
Class /e> £>£ ; __ 
Copyright «?._£ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



PEAPACK PAPERS 



BY 



ADRIAN HOFFMAN JOLINE 



>7 M 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 
1911 



Copyright 1911 
By Adrian H. Joline 



©CLA30i 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE). 

Peapack 5 

A Chapter of Trifles 31 

Philosophers 69 

The Collecting of Books 95 

Reflections of a Receiver 127 

Reading and Other Things 154 



PEAPACK 



PEAPACK. 

It was once a favorite amusement of journalistic 
humorists to provide moderate merriment for the 
masses by disporting with the names of places, but 
the time has almost gone by when the mention of 
Oshkosh, Kalamazoo, Ypsilanti, and Red Dog is re- 
garded as passably funny. The Australian settle- 
ments, the English rural villages, and the lakes of 
Maine, about which Orpheus C Kerr wrote a long 
and fairly tedious poem, are no longer provocative of 
even limited mirth. There still remains, however, a 
lingering element of the comic in "Peapack," a name at 
once concise, alliterative and pastoral. I have known 
grave physicians, solemn brokers, and even learned 
lawyers — one of the most eminent living members of 
that profession was born there — to indulge in bursts 
of glee over it, while others, with less sense of the 
ridiculous, have expressed serious doubts whether it 
ever existed, whether it was not a kind of geographi- 
cal Mrs. Harris ; and others still have sought to merge 
its simple personality in the more sonorous but essen- 
tially commonplace appellation of "Gladstone." Pea- 



8 

pack is not and never can be Gladstone any more than 
Tarrytown can be Scarborough, or Whippany, Morris- 
town. It preserves its individuality although it lies 
but a short railway journey from Hoboken; triumph- 
antly American, notwithstanding that it is compre- 
hended within the county of Somerset and that town- 
ship of Bedminster which took its name from a ham- 
let in Somersetshire, and it is not at all envious of 
Pluckemin, Roxiticus, Piscataway, or Parsippany. 

There is no place within my knowledge more seduc- 
tive to the weary struggler who comes upon it after a 
life of contention in that high-cliffed valley of torture 
appropriately denominated "Wall Street/' or to the 
despondent patriot who has dimmed the purity of his 
soul and impaired the vigor of his intellect in wrestling 
with the problems of tariff reform, the income tax, the 
anti-trust laws, direct primaries, the initiative, referen- 
dum and recall, and how to be virtuous and happy 
though rich. "It is one of the quietest places in the 
whole world," as Irving wrote of his beloved Sleepy 
Hollow; and "if ever I should wish for a retreat 
whither I might steal from the world and its distrac- 
tions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a 
troubled life, I know of none more promising than this 



little valley" or those green, attractive hills. Even the 
invasion of a few gentle and unobtrusive men of wealth 
has not impaired its beauty, and the snorts and smoke 
of the motor-car seldom disturb its profound repose. 
When, from time to time, the hoarse whistle of a 
Lackawanna locomotive startles the inoffensive rabbit 
or puts to flight a casual flock of melancholy crows, the 
sound dies away quickly and is lost in the hollows of 
the wood-clad heights or mingles with the hum of the 
bees or the chant of the locusts. 

I cannot learn that even one heroic deed was ever 
performed within its boundaries, although there may 
have been many of them which history has omitted 
to chronicle. I am not aware that any mute, inglorious 
Milton or any Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood 
rests under the sod of its ancient cemetery. When 
Baskingridge was convulsed with the excitement at- 
tending the capture of the vainglorious Charles Lee at 
Mrs. White's tavern on that frosty December morning 
in 1776; while Pluckemin was thrilling with wonder 
at the grand fete and ball given in honor of the French 
Alliance — "a most genteel entertainment," according 
to the patriotic and ponderous Knox, — attended by 
"above seventy ladies, all of the first ton in the State," 



10 

and while the ragged army of Washington was march- 
ing patiently back and forth through the classic pre- 
cincts of Vealtown, on its way to or from Morristown, 
Peapack preserved its restful calm, its placid coolness, 
its unruffled equanimity. None of these things moved 
Peapack. 

The historian of these parts, the industrious but 
often garrulous Melick, tells us that the name is Indian, 
and that it was applied not only to the north branch 
of the Raritan (which joins the Allametank or Lam- 
ington River, and is not on any account to be con- 
founded with the Rackawack), but also to the old In- 
dian thoroughfare which ran from east to west through 
northern New Jersey, crossing the Lamington at the 
falls, and trodden for generations by countless aborigi- 
nal moccasins. The "Peapack Patent" was granted by 
the Proprietors to George Willocks and John Johnstone 
in 1 70 1, and from that remote period Peapack has 
watched with somnolent serenity the disappearance of 
the Indians from the well-worn trail, has listened to 
the tread of armies, and has witnessed the expulsion of 
the British rulers, the creation and growth of a power- 
ful republic, the waging of a great Civil War, the 
quadrennial rescue of the nation from destruction, by 



II 

the unselfish efforts of disinterested statesmen, the ad- 
vent of the automobile, and the arrival of the million- 
aires, without a quiver of its equable pulse or a quick- 
ening of its pacific heart-beat. Thirty years ago the 
History of Somerset County — one of those porten- 
tous repositories of wearisome details, crammed with 
strange and awful portraits of severe-looking rustics 
adorned with all the infinite variety of bucolic whisker 
for which they are so famous — records that "the vil- 
lage is located on a road running north and south along 
Peapack or Lawrence Brook and is a long, straggling 
village extending about two miles" ; and further, that 
it "now contains a hotel, two grist-mills, post office, two 
churches (Reformed and Methodist), four stores, three 
blacksmith shops, three wheelwrights, distillery, six 
perpetual lime-kilns, and nine set kilns." There is 
something quite impressive about a "perpetual lime- 
kiln," suggestive of the Pyramids, the Temple of Mem- 
non, the Acropolis at Athens, and of Mr. Richard 
Swiveller and the Lodge of Glorious Apollos. It typi- 
fies the persistent pertinacity of Peapack. The statisti- 
cal information, so characteristic of American local his- 
tories, is useful, perhaps, but not enlivening. Somehow 
it fails to convey to the mind a notion of the charm of 



12 

the place. I confess I do not know how many hotels, 
distilleries, or even lime-kilns now contribute to its ma- 
terial prosperity, nor do I care. The urban qualities 
of Peapack are not alluring to me; its rural spirit and 
the sense of remoteness from what Artemus Ward 
called "the busy haunts of trade" are what make my 
Peapack, and neither hotel nor distillery adds to my 
enjoyment of it. For metropolitan gaiety, the giddy 
disciples of fashion may hie them to the neighboring 
city of Vealtown, now Bernardsville, looked down upon 
by all loyal Peapackians, whose modern name was 
shamelessly borrowed as history reveals. A Bernards- 
ville burrower in the dust-heaps of antiquity lately felt 
a momentary glow of pride when, in Barber and 
Howe's Historical Collections of New Jersey — that 
rather quaint but fascinating volume, embellished with 
ravishing wood-cuts of Bound Brook, Branchville, and 
the county buildings at Salem — he came upon the 
astounding statement that "Bernardsville, formerly 
called 8 Mile Ferry, is situated on the Delaware, 
has a tavern, store, and a canal basin attached to the 
feeder of the Delaware and Raritan Canal. There is 
a lattice bridge opposite to this place, connecting it 
with Taylorsville. This is the spot at which Wash- 



13 

ington crossed the Delaware previous to his capture 
of the Hessians at Trenton." Alas, prematurely exul- 
tant Bernardsvillain, it was not the same ! Your boast- 
ful burgh has a tavern — yea, several of them; but 
Washington never crossed anything there, except, pos- 
sibly, Mine Brook, and I fear me that if he had re- 
mained for any length of time near its banks, the Hes- 
sians would have been the captors. But it is difficult 
to understand why any one should wish to borrow the 
name of that Royalist Governor, of whom Trevelyan 
says : "Since Machiavelli undertook to teach the Medici 
how principalities might be governed and maintained, 
no such body of literature was put on paper as that in 
which Sir Francis Bernard (for his services procured 
him a baronetcy) instructed George the Third and his 
Ministers in the art of throwing away a choice portion 
of a mighty Empire." 

Those who regard that nation as happy which has 
no history, will deem Peapack fortunate in possessing 
none whatever save the chronicle of the building of a 
saw-mill and grist-mill in the latter part of the eight- 
eenth century; the construction of Van Dorn's mill in 
1808, and subsequently of the three blacksmith shops 
of Logan, Doren and Ferdinand Van Dorn; and, later 



on, the erection of the Methodist and Reformed 
chinches. For many years the annual picnic of the 
multitudinous Smiths caused much labored facetious- 
ness in the columns of the New York journals, which 
repeated, year after year, with the monotonous reitera- 
tion of newspapers, the same well-worn jests and time- 
honored pleasantries; but the picnics have fallen into 
oblivion, and the grounds, once neat and trim, are now 
shabby and neglected. There is literally nothing here 
for the antiquarians . to dispute about, and careful re- 
search fails to disclose even that ordinary possession of 
a New Jersey village, a house where Washington slept 
or where he once had his headquarters. This saves 
much wear and tear on our faculty of credulity; my 
own has been sorely strained in the effort to believe in 
the house over by Kimball's Hill as the veritable one 
in which Tempe Wicks or Wicke, as you may prefer, 
concealed her famous steed, about which Frank Stock- 
ton wrote almost his only poor story ; or that the lonely- 
looking edifice pointed out to me in the fields was once 
actually a part of the stately mansion of Lord Stirling; 
or that the pretty modern villa on the road from Lyons 
to Baskingridge is the genuine inn of Mrs. White, 
where the redoubtable Charles Lee took lodging ap- 



i5 

parently for the express purpose of facilitating his 
seizure by Harcourt's cavalry. Peapack scorns to im- 
pose such arduous tasks upon the visiting stranger. 
Whether in the future its short and simple annals are 
to be continued in their innocence and brevity is sadly 
uncertain. In recent days the telephone — ruthless de- 
stroyer of human tranquillity — has come to disturb its 
peacefulness, and I fear that golf and tennis will follow 
soon; perhaps even "bridge" may bring bad passions 
and unseemly strife into this virtuous community. It 
is strange how fashions repeat themselves. Not very 
I many years ago, cards were resorted to chiefly by 
I young and "sporty" men or by elderly, respectable per- 
sons. In our modern craze for them, we are reviving 
the experience of the eighteenth century, when "Whist, 
that desolating Hun/' overran society, and Johnson and 
Mrs. Chapone said in the Rambler: "At card table, 
however brilliant, I have always thought my visit lost, 
for I could know nothing of the company but their 
clothes and their faces. I saw their looks clouded at 
the beginning of every game, with a uniform solicitude, 
now and then in its progress varied with a short tri- 
umph; at one time wrinkled with cunning, at another 
deadened by despondency, or, by accident, flushed with 



i6 

rage at the unskilful or unlucky play of a partner. 
From such assemblies * * * I was quickly forced to 
retire; they were too trifling for me when I was grave, 
and too dull when I was cheerful. " Hannah More 
said that Mrs. Montagu and herself were "the two 
monsters in creation who never touch a card." We 
cannot forget, though, Doctor Johnson's confession: 
"1 am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is 
very useful in life; it generates kindness and consoli- 
dates society." I do not know about the "kindness," 
but it certainly does "consolidate society." I believe 
that it has not yet seized upon the fashionable circles 
of Peapack, but I have occasionally observed some of 
the male citizens beguiling themselves by toying with 
"the devil's picture-books," as well as with some curi- 
ous, flat, circular objects of divers hues, and it would 
not be surprising if cards ultimately became popular in 
Peapack. 

There has been foxless fox hunting there, or in the 
immediate vicinity ; but I cannot say that there has been 
any of the sport called "polo." It is an amusement too 
violent and dangerous to suit the tranquil folk of this 
neighborhood. Southey mentions — but he may be 
merely quoting from the Letters of Don Manuel 



i7 

[jAlvarez Espriella — that at Bristol he saw "a shaved 
jmonkey shown for a fairy, and a shaved bear, in a check 
I waistcoat and trousers, sitting in a great chair as an 
Ethiopian savage"; and Southey's son-in-law, John 
Wood Warter, B. D., adds in a note: "I saw the like 
disgusting exhibition in Wolverhampton about the year 
1817. The poor beast was then called, as I well recol- 
lect, the Polo Savage." I never knew exactly what he 
meant, but from this reminiscent observation we must 
conclude that nearly a hundred years ago the polo 
player was even more wild and awe-inspiring than he 
is now. I can understand about the trousers, but the 
allusion to a check waistcoat is puzzling, for it has 
never been my privilege to behold either a bear, shaved 
or otherwise, or a devotee of polo thus attired, that 
variety of costume being generally associated with 
statesmen of Brooklyn. 

But at present it is still a notable place in which to 
do nothing at all, and we have the word of Thomas 
Gray that "doing nothing is a most amusing business." 
In our scientific age even the farming is reduced to a 
mere matter of machinery, and it is no longer possible, 
much to the sorrow of the indolent, to lie idly on a warm 
June day and enjoy 



i8 

"The music of the scythes that glide and leap, 
The young men whistling, as their great arms sweep, 
And all the perfume and sweet sense of sleep." 

One is more apt to hear the emphatic remarks of 
encouragement or censure, addressed by the driver to 
his team, although there is a certain melody in the 
mowing machine and the steel sulky rake. Still, they 
are not clamorous for innovations at Peapack. The 
brains of tillers of the soil, as we all know, are naturally 
unprogressive and conservative, which is no doubt the 
reason why the farmer is such a pet of our Congress- 
men. Peapack is not possessed of that potent promoter 
of civilization, a Carnegie Library, but it has its weekly 
newspaper, full of social intelligence and patent insides, 
where one may read the pleasant intelligence that Miss 
Stokes is 'Visiting with" the Noakeses, or the rather 
startling announcement "to the public" that Miss Sny- 
der has "purchased a stock of ladies and children's dry 
goods and notions," and "will be pleased to show her 
line to prospective customers." But the innocent little 
paper does not drive the public to frenzy over questions 
of politics, and the normal citizen cares as little for them 
as Gilbert White of Selborne did for the corruption of 
Walpole or the fortunes of Pitt or Newcastle, pre- 



19 

ferring to study the habits of Timothy the Tortoise. 
One may dwell there in comfort and refuse to be un- 
happy because some one else is amassing a fortune 
larger than his own. Nor does any one appear to suf- 
fer from the apprehension that his right of absolute 
equality with all others is about to be destroyed by de- 
signing plutocrats. They have not been trained by 
oratorical ex-schoolmasters to be dissatisfied with their 
lot. They are not believers in the sacred duty of him 
who happens to be discontented about something, to 
get his neighbors in a ferment over the matter. Never- 
theless they are not wholly indifferent to politics truly 
so-called. 

A persistent notoriety-seeker, one of the sort of 
humbugs so dear to the cheap magazines, not long ago, 
in the presence of a large audience, delivered himself 
of this platitude: "The most dangerous citizen in any 
city is the man who affects indifference and considers 
himself above politics, and no war can more surely 
accomplish the ruin than such a citizen." This has the 
same flavor which pervades some remarks made re- 
cently by a District Attorney of lofty ideals, who pro- 
claimed that it was the worst crime conceivable by the 
human mind to arrange a combination of manufac- 



20 

turors and dealers in wire! Most decent people "con- 
sider themselves above" the politics of the day, although 
they are not "indifferent" to them. I may "consider 
myself above" the picking of pockets, and yet not be 
indifferent to it. But politics in its true sense — "the 
art or science of conducting the affairs of communities" 
— is something quite different from the "politics" 
which, by a perversion of terms, is used to character- 
ize the business of obtaining money and offices under 
false pretences, the game of graft and greed as it is 
played by the professionals who have made the name 
of "politician" synonymous with "trickster." There 
are no politicians in Peapack, and I doubt if its voters 
would care a straw whether they had a "Commission" 
form of government or an ordinary Board of Pirates 
to rule over them. 

As to the eternal feminine, the sage of Peapack be- 
lieves in letting the dear things vote if they will only 
not grow so unbecomingly warm and angry about it. 
This venerable personage once submitted to be "inter- 
viewed" with all the coyness of a reluctant statesman 
just returned from foreign sojournings and awaiting 
on the pier with gentle resignation the onslaught of 
the reporters. "We learn from the Travels of Cyrus," he 



21 

observed, "that the Lycians were governed by women 
and found it the easiest and most convenient form of 
government. Their queens had a council of Senators 
who assisted them with their advice. The men proposed 
good laws, but the women caused them — that is, the 
laws — to be executed. The sweetness and mildness of 
the sex prevented all the mischief of tyranny, and the 
counsel of the wise Senators qualified that inconsistency 
with which women are reproached." When I thought 
of the sweetness and mildness of the Pankhursts and 
the Milhollands, tempered by the wisdom of the Jeff 
Davises (of Arkansas) and the Martines, I could but 
bow my acquiescence. Peapack was only maintaining 
ancient precedents. Candidly, a slight acquaintance 
with some of the good dames of Peapack confirms me 
in my long-cherished belief that the world will never 
be perfectly happy until the women do all the voting 
and absolutely exclude the other sex from the ballot- 
box. Truly, the men have made a rather bad job of it, 
all things considered ; the women could not possibly do 
worse. The mistake which the so-called "suffragettes" 
have made during their long years of striving has been 
in not demanding enough ; they have been too conserva- 
tive, too modest about the matter. As for the "incon- 



22 

sistency" maliciously referred to by Cyrus, there is not 
much to be said without a blush by those masculine 
leaders of political thought in our day, some of whom 
brag of having taught a certain creed during two dec- 
ades, but discovered that they had been utterly wrong 
as soon as they began to hear themselves " talked of for 
the Presidency." 

The liberal views of the sage led me to beseech my 
aged friend to favor me with some of his ideas respect- 
ing the true theory of government, but here I regretted 
to find that he was sadly unprogressive. Instead of 
quoting from the works of those enlightened philoso- 
phers, Bryan, Bourne, and Wickersham, he betrayed 
his fondness for long-refuted sophistries by taking from 
the shelf a well-worn volume and reading to me 
this passage from Macaulay's review of Southey's 
Colloquies on Society: 

"It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey's 
idol, the omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the 
prudence and energy of the people that England has 
hitherto been carried forward in civilization, and it is 
to the same prudence and the same energy that we now 
look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best 



23 

promote the improvement of the nation by strictly con- 
fining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by 
leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, com- 
modities their fair price, industry and intelligence their 
natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punish- 
ment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by 
diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict 
economy in every department of the State. Let the 
Government do this, the People will assuredly do the 
rest." 

This was so hopelessly old-fashioned that I could 
not refrain from informing him that this theory had 
long since been exploded; that the function of govern- 
ment, in the modern view, was to extend itself to all 
fields of business and even of private life ; to discourage 
trade ; to drive away capital ; to deter men from wicked 
extravagance by imposing heavy taxes upon their prop- 
erty while living and to lead them away from habits 
of pernicious accumulation by robbing their estates 
after they were dead; to support and maintain at the 
public cost the idle, the foolish, and the unthrifty; to 
lavish the revenue in all sorts of fantastical enterprises ; 
nay, more, to make all laws andjts administration de- 
pend upon the passing whim of a chance majority 



24 

swayed by the newest demagogue. He shook his head 
increduously and assured me that it would never do 
for Peapack. I inquired, "Why not?" and he replied, 
"Because." I saw that his woman-suffrage ideas were 
having their effect. 

Bearing in mind that he had inflicted upon me an 
extract from an obsolete book, I said to him: "O 
man of Peapack, listen to me while I unfold unto you 
the wisdom of an English person named Brooks, as it 
is revealed to us in the North American Review of 
August, 191 1 : 

"Half a century ago the instinctive feeling of the 
average man was that the less there was of govern- 
ment the better. So long as the institutions under 
which he lived fulfilled, with reasonable efficiency, the 
role of a superior policeman and protected personal and 
property rights, he was content. It was all, or almost 
all, he asked of them. He lacked what we should call 
to-day the larger civic consciousness ; he had little con- 
ception of a regime powerful for positive as well as 
for negative ends, and of a community organized and 
using its collective strength and energy for purposes 
of constructive and universal beneficence; it hardly 
occurred to him to make of local or national adminis- 



25 

tration an agency for the active promotion of the com- 
mon welfare; he retained in something like its pristine 
freshness the robust pioneer spirit of individualism ; and 
so far from welcoming, he resented and strongly op- 
posed everything that smacked of official meddlesome- 
ness. We are far removed from him to-day ; he seems 
in our eyes a poor, stunted, almost inexplicable figure." 

"These be fine words/' he observed serenely. "I read 
the article you mention. The writer displays his learn- 
ing and perspicacity by referring to the late General 
Winfield Scott Hancock as 'not the least shrewd of 
American statesmen/ and he belongs to a class of 
beings who earn a precarious living by that kind of 
silliness. Those who know the men who make up our 
Legislatures — State and National — are unable to re- 
gard them seriously as agents 'for the promotion of the 
common welfare' or to imagine them engaged in 'con- 
structive and universal beneficence.' Theoretically, they 
should be, but it requires a much larger 'civic con- 
sciousness' than I possess to fancy them organizing the 
'collective strength and energy' of the community for 
beneficent purposes. When we study the characters of 
our modern Solons who occupy so much space in the 



26 

Senate House and in the muck-raking magazines, we 
can understand why they should find the statesmen of 
the past 'inexplicable,' but I doubt whether they would 
venture to consider their predecessors as 'poor' or 
'stunted.' Certainly, in Peapack, Washington and 
Franklin, Madison and Webster, continue to loom more 
largely than La Follette of Wisconsin or Owen of 
Oklahoma." 

I endeavored to make, it plain to him that no in- 
dividual should seek to exalt himself above his fellows, 
either by cultivating his mind or by practising industry 
and economy, for thereby he may destroy equality. I 
reminded him that Jefferson and a whole Congress had 
declared that all men were created equal and were en- 
dowed with certain inalienable rights, including "the 
pursuit of happiness," so. that whatever you do to inter- 
fere with my pursuit of happiness is wrong, although 
the rule does not work both ways. But he insisted that 
it is not true ; that Doctor Eliot says it is not true, which 
ought to be conclusive; that Jefferson was referring 
only to political rights ; that he, Jefferson, did not believe 
it himself, for he owned slaves. I answered that the 
illustrious Virginian did not mean to forbid slavery 
any more than the inspired author of the "Sherman 



27 

Act" meant to forbid all trade combinations; and it 
has been finally adjudged that this author intended to 
prohibit only those which might be distasteful to some 
gentlemen for the time being occupying seats on some- 
thing which is called "the Supreme Bench," although 
it is really nine large and not particularly comfortable- 
looking chairs. When he prayed to be told just how 
one could determine in advance what would or would 
not be agreeable to the nine gentlemen of the black 
robes, I could only say, "Guess." "And," he persisted, 
"if one guesses wrong?" "Then," I responded oracu- 
larly, "he is an outlaw, guilty of the most atrocious 
crime known to society; he will be pursued by fierce 
Attorney-Generals, hounded by hundreds of hungry 
District Attorneys, harassed by hordes of special coun- 
sel, bent on glory and a hundred thousand a year, not 
including disbursements, and it would be better for that 
man if he had never been born." "Let us talk of some- 
thing worth while," he sighed ; "these are but the follies 
of a day." 

It may be inferred that the dwellers in this secluded 
Paradise are fond of their books ; not so much of those 
which are flavored with tabasco and which scream at us 
from title-page to colophon, as of those which are rest- 



28 

ful and soothing, the perusal whereof is like a pleasant 
loitering through quiet lanes and not a furious pranc- 
ing in a crowded thoroughfare. They are what Mr. 
James Hosmer Penniman, in his Books and How to 
Make the Most of Them, calls "nomadic readers," com- 
plaining severely of them because, he says, they read 
"as the gypsies live, camping everywhere but for a 
night, without purpose and without profit/ ' To a slow, 
dry intellect such reading may seem to be without profit, 
if life is to be restricted to mere profit-gaining; but the 
genuine lover of books understands how to derive from 
it a very substantial profit — a mind well stored and con- 
tented. The gypsies camp, I fancy, for a purpose, to 
wit: that of obtaining needed rest; and it may some- 
times be better to camp with the gypsies than to be 
immured in a palace or shut up in a tenement house. 
You might as well tell me that I can derive no health 
and happiness from a ramble in the woods or an aim- 
less strolling in the fields, but must devote myself wholly 
to a formal "constitutional" or a walk from home to 
office. He must, indeed, be a stupid reader, a veritable 
prig of a reader, who always seats himself solemnly 
with a "useful" book in hand, saying complacently to 
himself, "I am reading for a purpose; I am bent upon 



29 

a profit/ ' Such a man would scorn the Essays of Elia, 
the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, the Sketch Book 
of Irving and nearly all the fiction which has amused 
and comforted mankind, and betake himself to a text- 
book on Elementary Logic or a treatise on Quar- 
ternions. 

It must be admitted, though reluctantly, that in 
point of fact I have never seen a resident of Peapack 
in the act of reading anything but a newspaper, and my 
judgment concerning his literary taste is not empirical 
but the result of a priori reasoning. To be strictly 
truthful, I have never enjoyed the blessing of living 
in Peapack. In that respect it has been my Carcassonne, 
almost within my reach, but never fully attained. My 
occasional glimpses of it have been sadly infrequent. 
But I have presumed upon slight acquaintance to 
borrow its name as a title for a few "papers." which 
make no pretensions to utility. As Taylor, the Water 
Poet, said of some of his own work, "The chiefest 
cause why I wrote this was on set purpose to please 
myself." The Pennimans will flout them, the intel- 
lectual Gradgrinds will pass them contemptuously by; 
they will not be found to teach any great moral lesson 
or to inculcate any of the "uplifting" principles so 



30 



popular in our day, when we are all so concerned about 
the uplifting of other people. Perhaps it may be well 
for a man of becoming modesty not to strain his up- 
lifting energies too much, but to try to exercise them 
on himself for awhile and not exhaust his powers in 
the effort to uplift all the rest of the world, which 
will surely get along somehow without his solicitous 
interference. At all events, these papers may possibly 
find some readers — in Peapack. 



A CHAPTER OF TRIFLES 



A CHAPTER OF TRIFLES. 

The reading division of mankind seems to be com- 
posed of two brigades ; one absorbed in the contempla- 
tion of the serious and overpowering problems of sci- 
ence and sociology, devoted to the modern "fad" of 
endeavoring to make all men perfect and absolutely 
equal by writing books and organizing "Societies for 
the Improvement" of everything and everybody, while 
the other is chiefly occupied about trifles — the details 
of automobile and aviation statistics, polo scores, bat- 
ting averages, golf records, novels, Public Service 
Commission reports, and — in a very small degree — the 
gossip of literature. Mr. Street says in Books and 
Things: "It is a reading age and country and our 
people are at present trivial in their interests ; inevitably 
what they read will be trivial also ; most of their favor- 
ite novels are trivial in effect." He is referring, of 
course, to his own country and to works of fiction, but 
his remark is applicable to us and to the products of 
our presses. There is nothing especially new in this 
criticism of popular preferences. We are apt to sneer 
at the tastes of the majority, fancying that only we of 



34 

the select minority are competent to judge with dis- 
crimination. Fanny Burney said of Sir Philip Jennings 
Clerk that "he was a professed minority man," and 
many of us like to affect that pose, particularly if we 
belong to the class of the unappreciated. Long ago that 
tedious and eccentric litterateur, Sir Egerton Brydges 
— who, to give him his due, proclaimed in his Anti- 
Critic "the folly of the cry against multiplying books" 
— wrote in his Autobiography: "What are so frivolous 
and insufferably foolish as many of the popular books? 
They are not only trite and vulgar, but misrepresent 
everything both of principles and manners." He knew 
that he himself was not popular, and he spoke with 
feeling. Unappreciated authors are apt to groan about 
the folly of the day and the decadence of literature, and 
one should not take them as seriously as they take them- 
selves. 

It is true, nevertheless, that we occasionally en- 
counter manifestations of dulness which tend to impair 
our confidence in the public taste; but they are found 
chiefly in the vapid utterances of our daily press. It 
was quite startling, but in a way it was comforting to 
a benighted New Yorker, to discover in the Boston 
Globe of July 18, 191 1 — the "Boston Globe," be it re- 
membered — this evidence of the present state of culture 






35 

in our modern Athens : "Centenary of the birth of Wil- 
liam Makepeace Thackeray, born July 18, 1811, in Cal- 
cutta. Time can be spent to better advantage than in 
reading his novels." It is undoubtedly true that "time 
may be spent to better advantage" than in reading 
novels at all; possibly in perusing the writings of Bur- 
ton J. Hendrick, or of Judson C. Welliver, or the illumi- 
nating disquisitions contained in the Globe; or, perhaps, 
in the case of editors, pursuing a course of elementary 
instruction in the use of the English language. But 
what better illustrates the petty vulgarity of the sensa- 
tional newspaper than this silly sneer at the man who 
has delighted and inspired the intelligent readers of two 
or three generations, and whose fame is secure in the 
minds of all lovers of literature ? For having once care- 
lessly ventured to express a sneaking preference for 
Anthony Trollope as a teller of stories, I was pilloried 
by a critic as "a very small dog, barking at the heels of 
Thackeray." I deny the barking, which existed wholly 
in the critic's imagination, but it affords to me a sort of 
mild revenge to call the Globe person a very pestiferous 
mosquito buzzing about the good, gray head of the 
greatest of English novelists. 



36 



In spite of the newspapers, I doubt whether the 
interests or the reading of our day are any more trivial 
than they were in past generations. People do not read 
as much poetry as they did a hundred years ago when 
poetry was a very serious matter, or as many verbose 
and dreary dissertations on theological subjects as they 
did in preceding centuries or in New England during 
colonial times, when they appear to have been wholly 
devoid of cheerfulness until they had a Revolution. 
The good, old books are still loved and appreciated. It 
was but a few days ago when I came upon a laudatory 
review in the Sun, of a new volume called "Comfort 
Found in Old Books," by Mr. George Hamlin Fitch, 
where we are taught that there are things worthy of 
attention in the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, Don Quix- 
ote, Paradise Lost, Boswell's Johnson, and other toler- 
ably well-known works. I had always supposed that I 
myself had uttered more venerable platitudes about 
books than any other living person, but I yield humbly 
to Fitch. He tells us, for example, that "to discuss 
favorite books with congenial associates is one of the 
greatest pleasures of life as well as one of the best 
tests of knowledge." In the words of Joey Ladle, 
"Arter that ye may all on ye get to bed." 



37 

There are more books printed now than ever be- 
fore, but I do not think that there are too many. The 
complaint about "too many books" is as old as printing 
itself, and I am not sure that it is not even older. We 
have heard it from the most unexpected sources. Does 
not Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy thus deliver 
himself ? "What a catalogue of new books all this year, 
all this age (I say) have our Franc-furt marts, our do- 
mestic marts, brought out! * * * Who can read 
them ? As already we shall have a vast chaos and con- 
fusion of Books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes 
ache with reading, our fingers with turning." His 
greater and wiser contemporary, with more philosophi- 
cal calmness, suggests a remedy. "The opinion of 
plenty is among the causes of want," said Bacon, "and 
the great quantity of books maketh a shew rather of 
superfluity than lack ; which surcharge, nevertheless, is 
not to be remedied by making no more books, but by 
making more good books, which, as the serpent of 
Moses, might devour the serpents of the enchanters." 
More than three hundred years ago, Barnabe Rich, the 
translator of Herodotus, wrote in A New Description 
of Ireland: "One of the diseases of this age is the 
multitude of books, that doth so overcharge the world 



38 

that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter 
that is every day hatched and brought into the world." 
After all, few books are absolutely bad, except perhaps 
those of Mr. Francis Gribble, who years ago kindled 
my wrath by sneering at Hawthorne, and who has been 
engaged for a considerable time in the fabrication of 
literary omelets composed of defective eggs, such as 
his Life of Rachel. He is one of those literary scaven- 
gers who, in a biography of Alexander Hamilton, 
would find little to talk about except the Reynolds affair, 
or in a "Life of George Eliot" would devote his energies 
chiefly to her irregularities of private conduct. In Eng- 
land, they call a certain sort of writing "Birrelling," 
and a pleasant sort it is ; no doubt a certain other sort, 
extremely unpleasant, may well be called "Gribbling," 
although I do not assert any claim of originality in the 
matter, for the same idea must have occurred to others. 
My chief wonder is that this man has been dealt with 
so gently by the reviewers. 

Most of us are fond of trifles, literary and other- 
wise; they divert us and give us comfort. But every- 
one has a hearty scorn of other people's trifles, being 
unfamiliar with them. "We all have a dark feeling 
of resistance towards people we have never met," says 



39 

Chesterton, "and a profound and manly dislike of the 
authors we have never read." I am conscious that the 
trifles which are pleasant to me are odious to large 
numbers of my intelligent fellow-beings, and I know 
that I detest theirs and would gladly forbid their enjoy- 
ment if I were a legislature in a "progressive" State. I 
have a friend, charming and scholarly, who for many 
years has carefully noted the state of the thermometer 
at the hour of his rising, and keeps the record of his 
observations. I knew another — one of the founders of 
the Grolier Club — who carried with him a memorandum 
book in which he set down the names of all the sleeping- 
cars he encountered, with divers particulars about their 
interiors. I cannot comprehend what satisfaction is to 
be derived from such labors ; but my own hobbies may 
be just as distasteful to sensible persons. Perhaps that 
is why I am often "called names." A wise and decent 
newspaper in New York recently dubbed me "an anti- 
quarian," because I had written of Francis Jeffrey, who 
died in 1853. No doubt sixty years ago is, to the 
journalist of to-day, a period of remote antiquity, and 
the man who troubles himself about anything which 
was done or written then, is a dry-as-dust burrower in 
a far-distant past. That may be a reason why, in the 



40 

columns of our favorite morning or evening paper and 
even in our magazines, we are constantly coming upon 
alleged novelties which were just as new to our great- 
grandfathers as they appear to be to the joyous youth 
of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is for the best, 
and nobody is actually injured by the imposition often 
practised innocently. We are all of us apt to think that 
because a thing is new to us, it must be an original 
discovery of our own; particularly those of us who 
never received a true education, but have plumed our- 
selves upon the fact that we never wasted precious 
years in silly colleges, but "educated" ourselves in our 
own way, untrammeled by the bonds of a discarded 
past. I have sometimes wondered what the ideas of Mr. 
Carnegie about education really were. Judging from 
some of his utterances, they must be very much like 
Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg. 

I cannot conceal the fact, if I would, that I am a 
little wounded by the accusation of being an "anti- 
quarian," partly because I have not "the sweet con- 
sciousness of guilt." A real antiquarian who deals with 
things truly ancient and recondite, has a certain dig- 
nity even if this lively generation does look upon him 
with a sort of pity akin to that with which a lordly Pan- 



41 

hard regards a modest road-wagon, or that which a 
soaring aeroplane feels for the eclipsed Panhard. I am 
aware that in using the name "Panhard" I am display- 
ing the antiquarian's alleged ignorance of modern 
things; I remember that name because it is appropri- 
ately ugly, for ordinarily I look upon the automobile as 
"a deed without a name." 

The luckless citizen who has been unsuccessful in 
avoiding a rampaging motor car has a natural shiver 
of indignation when he reads in the daily press that he 
is "an aged man of fifty," and I own that I am justly 
incensed at this epithet of "antiquarian." One never 
thinks of "the ancients"— -Plato, Tarquin, Julius Caesar, 
and the like — as infants in short clothes. So "anti- 
quarian" conveys the idea of a man wearing spectacles 
of enormous size, bowed with his burden of useless 
information and clad in a dilapidated swallow-tailed 
coat well covered with the dust of what are commonly 
called "musty tomes" and odorous of mouldering parch- 
ment. Not so irritating is the charge of having erred 
in bestowing upon the great purveyor of paradoxes, the 
aforesaid Gilbert Chesterton, the name of "George" in- 
stead of the one conferred upon him by his sponsors in 
baptism, because the indictment is well founded. The 



42 

right to blunder occasionally is an inalienable one to 
which every writer has become entitled by prescription. 
It is consecrated by its association with the great. 
Readers of Trevelyan's "Life" will remember the 
catastrophe which a wandering attention or a perverse 
pen brought upon the "cock-sure" Macaulay. The 
Essay on Warren Hastings, as it first appeared in the 
Edinburgh Review, contained in the very second para- 
graph this remarkable reference to the author of the 
book which Macaulay was reviewing: "More eminent 
men than Mr. Gleig have written nearly as ill as he, 
when they have stooped to similar drudgery. It would 
be unjust to estimate Goldsmith by 'The Vicar of Wake- 
field' or Scott by the 'Life of Napoleon.' " It is not 
surprising that the horrified Macaulay, finding this 
strange misfortune staring him boldly in the face as 
the printed error always* (Joes after having hidden 
itself with shrinking modesty in the manuscript, hur- 
ried to point out to Macvey Napier the "absurd blun- 
der," with this sad confession : "I have not, I am sorry 
to say, the consolation of being able to blame either you 
or the printer; for it must have been a slip of my own 
pen. I have put 'The Vicar of Wakefield' instead of 
the 'History of Greece.' " 



43 

It is easy to explain an error like that, but not so 
easy to understand how the author of that interesting 
work, The Victorian Chancellors — Mr. J. B. Atlay, 
"of Lincoln's Inn, barrister at law" — came to insert this 
note, referring to Basil Montagu, the lawyer and 
scholar : "And the husband of Mrs. Montagu, Queen 
of the Blue-stockings." Elizabeth Montagu, who held 
that royal title, fifty years the senior of Basil, married 
Edward Montagu twenty-eight years before the birth 
of the accomplished editor of Bacon. Mr. Atlay else- 
where assures us that "President Jefferson" approved 
a declaration of war against Great Britain in June, 
1812, some three years after the Sage of Monticello 
had given place to Madison. That is pardonable in an 
Englishman; but when a writer deliberately perpe- 
trates such a blunder as the one about Montagu, which 
was not committed currente calamo, we cannot help 
feeling a doubt about the accuracy of all the rest of his 
historical and biographical information. 

The late Mr. W. E. Henley, who had an attractive 
style, much originality and a very unpleasant disposi- 
tion, due possibly to ill health, observed that: "An 
American literary journal once assured its readers that 
Congreve has 'a niche in the Valhalla of Ben Jonson.' 



44 

The remark is injudicious, of course, even for a literary 
American. 1 ' Whether there has ever been such a thing, 
strictly speaking, as "an American literary journal," 
may be doubted. Perhaps the New York Evening Post 
comes near to it, although it does not formally lay claim 
to the title ; and it is a delight to the soul of one whom 
it has treated very kindly — such is the depravity of man 
— to discover the journal which boasts of Bryant, God- 
win and Godkin as editors of bygone years, tripping in 
manner following: "There are times when we would 
like to believe that * * * Oliver Wendell Holmes 
will retain fame for his 'Autocrat at (sic) the Break- 
fast Table,' his 'Old Ironsides/ and his 'Chambered 
Nautilus,' and not for his 'Father William' only." 
In a day or two after the appearance of this 
editorial outgiving, an unliterary morning contem- 
porary, in justifiable glee, burst forth in glad re- 
joicings, saying: "There are also times when one 
would like to believe that Bryant will retain fame for 
his 'Thanatopsis' and 'Lines to a Water Fowl,' and not 
for 'Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?' But there is 
no reason why Southey's estimable and moral verses 
about Father William should be despised even when 
they are attributed to Holmes." 



45 

Nor is there any reason why the aforesaid dicta- 
torial and frequently offensive Mr. W. E. Henley 
should miscall the great French critic "M. Henri 
Taine" as he does in his essay on Fielding. Many 
people with less pretensions know that the critic's 
name was "Hippolyte Adolphe Taine," although John 
Durand's translation of the History of English Litera- 
ture, published in 1872, does bear "Henri Taine" on 
the title-page. No "literary American," judicious or 
otherwise, would be guilty of Henley's offence, but 
Taine was a Frenchman and we must assume, I sup- 
pose, that he is unworthy to have his name remembered 
by a literary Englishman. 

There is probably little profit in the investigation 
and exposure of trifling literary inaccuracies; they are 
generally unimportant, and my slip about Chesterton 
is not of much consequence to anybody except to those 
queer persons who busy themselves in detecting au- 
thors, particularly poets and novelists, in errors about 
the moon. For some occult reason, fiction-writers are 
perpetually in trouble with that interesting satellite, 
causing her to rise and to set at unusual hours and in 
impossible places, to be eclipsed when she should not be 
eclipsed, and to shine when she has no astronomical 



4 6 

right to shine. In King Solomon's Mines, Rider Hag- 
gard eclipsed her when she was new, and Sir Walter 
Besant made her rise in the east at two o'clock in the 
morning, although that is of no more consequence than 
the amazing lessons in natural history presented to us 
in dear old Swiss Family Robinson or in Campbell's 
Gertrude- of Wyoming. No less a personage than Rob- 
ert Louis Stevenson had difficulties with Luna in Prince 
Otto, as Sir Walter Scott had with the sun in The Anti- 
quary. Like Artemus Ward, every novelist should have 
"a good moonist" at hand when he is about to perform 
lunar exploits. Historical misstatements are of a dif- 
ferent order, for they may do serious harm by mis- 
leading the unwary. When McM aster confuses John 
Armstrong of the Newburg Addresses with John Arm- 
strong the father, or when Doctor Woodrow Wilson 
derives the name of the battle of Tippecanoe from that 
of Tecumseh's brother, "the Prophet," they not only 
offend the microscopic eye of the "antiquarian," but 
they misinform the innocent student. The world has 
been afflicted with many such proofs of carelessness. 
Mr. Powell, in Excursions in Libraria, tells of an emi- 
nent professor who published a series of lectures which 
he had delivered before a "guileless university audi- 



47 

ence," in one whereof occurred the following typical 
passage: "About this time the young Earl of Shrews- 
bury, riding down the leafy lanes of , was met and 

cut down by a party of Roundheads." "This," says 
Powell, "smacks as much of orthodox English history as 
the paragraph repeated by 'Alice' in 'Wonderland/ and 
beginning 'Edwin and Morcar, the Earls of Mercia and 
Northumbrian But a truculent and hostile reviewer, 
entering upon the picturesque scene, pointed out with 
ill-concealed exultation, that, apart from other inac- 
curacies, the Earl of Shrewsbury in question (whose 
title was, it seems, correctly given), being fifty- four 
years of age, was no longer young, that the lanes — it 
being January — were presumably not 'leafy/ and 
finally, that the Earl was not 'met' or 'cut down/ but 
(though that is little matter to us in the year 1895) 
shot with a musket ball as he was endeavoring to 
escape." But the most reprehensible mistakes are those 
of historical misjudgment. 

Mr. J. Holland Rose, the careful biographer of 
Napoleon, ordinarily as dry as he is accurate, affords 
an example of the manner in which a sober and sedate 
chronicler now and then indulges in extraordinary his- 
torical vaticination. He says in regard to the proposed 



4 8 

flight to America, after Waterloo: "If he (Napoleon) 
had gone to the United States, who would have com- 
peted with him for the Presidency ?" If Mr. Rose 
possessed the faintest trace of humor, one might sup- 
pose that he was wandering into the regions of pleas- 
antry. Napoleon, who did not speak a word of Eng- 
lish, would have been a famous candidate and might 
have aroused the enthusiasm of the Federalists of New 
England and the Democrats of the West, but he would 
have found a few good-sized obstacles in his way — 
constitutional ones especially. It is easier to fancy him 
climbing into the Papal chair than to think of him as 
occupying the White House. Emperor he might have 
sought to be, but in this country in 1815 there was a 
slight prejudice against Emperors, and, on the whole, 
it is safe to say that Mr. Rose's inquiry involves a pre- 
posterous exercise of imagination. 

The late Richard Holt Hutton, of the Spectator, 
was an estimable editor and essayist, whose grave and 
labored performances are somewhat prosy. His 
"Literary Essays," published some fifty years ago, 
must, however, have been of interest to his countrymen, 
for they passed through a number of editions, the latest 
appearing, I think, in 1903. They belong to the class 



49 

of productions which affect readers less by their 
soundness or originality than by their impressive 
solemnity of judgment which causes them to possess 
that air of finality so satisfying to some minds. I sup- 
pose there is no terrestrial being more distinctly awe- 
inspiring than the editor of an English literary periodi- 
cal. Among these "Essays" there is a study of Nathan- 
iel Hawthorne, appreciative enough in a literary way, 
but condescending withal after the old-fashioned Eng- 
lish style. Among other strange things, Mr. Hutton 
says: "In the great Civil War his (Hawthorne's) 
sympathies, as might be expected, were with the trim- 
ming Buchanans and Douglasses of the hour, and not 
with Mr. Lincoln, of whom he spoke slightingly as a 
man incapable of true statesmanship." It is needless 
to enter into a full explanation of Hawthorne's attitude 
towards the political questions of his day ; but the refer- 
ence to "Douglass" — meaning, no doubt, Stephen Ar- 
nold Douglas — is curiously inept and unjust. Douglas 
died on June 3, 1861, when the "great Civil War" was 
barely seven weeks old; and if there is one incident in 
his career which preserves his honorable fame, it is the 
exhibition of his loyalty to the Union in 1861 and his 
hearty support of Lincoln, the man who had defeated 



5o 

him for the Presidency. Whatever mistakes he may 
have committed, he was no "trimmer." It is a mock- 
ery of fate that his name should be thus associated with 
that of Buchanan, against whom he had for years been 
fighting with a bitterness seldom equalled in our politi- 
cal history. Apart from its historical inaccuracy, this 
little passage illustrates the irresistible tendency of 
English writers to distort the names of our public men. 
Even J. Comyns Carr, in a recent book of reminis- 
cences, wishing to say something pleasant of George W. 
Childs, insists on calling him "Child" again and again, 
and Lord Jeffrey wrote of "Mr. Maddison" and "Mr. 
Munroe."* We find Lady St. Helier (better known, 
perhaps, as Lady Jeune) in her Memories of Fifty 
Years, describing her troubles at Salt Lake City in 1872, 
arising from the alleged fact that "General Maclellan 
was on a tour of inspection and was staying there with 
his staff," whereas McClellan had left the army in 1864; 
and speaking of Judah P. Benjamin, although she gives 
his name correctly because he lived in England, she 
says that he "attained the highest legal position in his 
own country, that, namely, of Attorney-General of the 

•Even Trevelyan, the excellent historian of the American Revolu- 
tion, praises the fifth President under the name of Alexander Monroe. 
Vol. II, Part 2, 84. 



Si 

Southern Confederacy ! The English are not ashamed 
of such blunders, because of their well-settled convic- 
tion that nothing which is not English is worth caring 
about. 

Hawthorne died in 1864, an d if he misjudged Lin- 
coln in the early years of the Rebellion, he had goodly 
company not only in his own land, but in the land of 
Hutton. An instance of the wisdom and prophetic 
powers of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and incidentally 
of Walter Bagehot, may be found in Bagehot' s Bio- 
graphical Studies. "The need of a definite aim," says 
Bagehot, writing in 1864 an d referring to Lewis, "ran 
through all his speculations. To take an example from 
the foreign politics now most interesting to us — Ameri- 
can politics — 'I have never/ said Sir George Lewis, in 
a letter of March, 1861, now lying before me, 'been able, 
either in conversation or by reading, to obtain an 
answer to the question : What will the North do if they 
beat the South ? To restore the old Union would be an 
absurdity. What other state of things does that village 
lawyer, Lincoln, contemplate as the fruit of victory ? It 
seems to me that the men now in power at Washington 
are just such persons as in this country get possession 
of a disreputable joint stock company. There is almost 



52 

the same amount of ability and honesty/ After nearly 
three years of experience it would be difficult to describe 
Washington more justly. But we do not cite the in- 
stance to prove Sir George Lewis's power of prediction, 
so much as to prove his unfailing desire for a distinct 
aim."* So one would suppose; but it does not seem 
to profit a man very much to strive for "a distinct aim" 
if the aim is all wrong. 

Our Civil War has always been a stumbling-block 
for the English. They made a false start and large 
numbers of them are even at this day sadly befogged 
about it. Some of them still believe that it was a war 
between North America and South America, but the 
best of them are usually in hopeless geographical con- 
fusion concerning us, reminding us of the Londoner 
who wrote to a friend in "the States" to ask if there 
were any buffalo in New York, and received the reply 
that "there is one Buffalo in New York." Still, we are 
almost as ignorant about Australia, and America is 
about as remote for an untravelled Englishman as Aus- 
tralia is for us. They are still convinced that an Ameri- 
can always "guesses," is always in a hurry, and drinks 
"slings" and "cobblers," although subsisting chiefly 

♦Biographical Studies (1899), pp. 359-360. 



53 

upon ice-water; but I have no doubt that there are 
Americans who would look for kangaroos in the streets 
of Sydney and expect to encounter emus in the thor- 
oughfares of Melbourne. I had a courier once who 
spent a weary hour endeavoring to convince me that 
Brooklyn is in New Jersey, but he was an Austrian and 
it turned out that he was thinking of Hoboken ; and on 
a steamer which was passing the Scilly Islands I heard 
a lady remark with conscious pride and in unmistakable 
Bostonese accents, "We have just seen Sicily." How- 
ever, no one but Dickens ever met an American who be- 
lieved that Queen Victoria dwelt in the Tower of 
London. 

Musical references are apt to be pitfalls for the man 
who does not know but merely assumes to know. The 
"sparkling adagio" mentioned by Charles Reade in Peg 
Woffington and "the grand old masses of Mendelssohn" 
discovered by Ouida, illustrate the perils of the inex- 
pert. Reade surely should have escaped, for he had a 
mania for violins and possessed a lot of curious lore 
about them. Perhaps Tennyson nodded when he made 
his orchestra for the ball in Maud consist of "flute, 
violin, and bassoon." Mr. Sutherland Edwards kindly 
attempts to defend the Laureate by suggesting that 



54 

"violin" may be intended to mean "the various instru- 
ments of the violin family" ; and it is true that we might 
supply a working band for ball purposes if we interpret 
"violin" as signifying also "second violin," "viola" and 
' 'cello," but it is "making believe very much." Un- 
doubtedly we ought not to demand of a poet a list of 
musical instruments after the catalogue style of Walt 
Whitman. Even musicians may wander a little at 
times. Sir Arthur Sullivan feared that some censorious 
critic might discover a slip in the great song "The Lost 
Chord," where it tells us that "I struck one chord of 
music like the sound of a grand Amen," because, strictly 
speaking, "Amen" requires two chords. He was rather 
hypercritical. Surely one chord may be prolonged so as 
to cover the two syllables, although the effect might not 
be particularly "grand" ; but no one seems to have found 
the mistake, if it was a mistake, and Sir Arthur appears 
to have been unduly apprehensive. 

If the lover of trifles should attempt to make an 
exhaustive collection of misquotations, the result would 
be appalling. Almost every one who quotes makes a 
mess of it, and even the standard Cyclopaedias of Quota- 
tions may not be trusted implicitly. I was told by my 
father, who was a member of the military staff of Gen- 



55 

eral John A. Dix (the first Governor of that name), that 
the scholarly General was accustomed to occupy the 
spare time in the mornings, between the completion of 
his toilet and the breakfast hour, in verifying the cita- 
tions in Bonn's Dictionary of Classical Quotations, and 
that he succeeded in detecting I forget how many hun- 
dred errors. Hazlitt generally wrote without any books 
at hand and almost always misquoted; Bagehot, too, 
suffered from the same disorder; and, I may add as a 
climax in my inventory of eminent offenders, I myself 
invariably misquote unless I have the original under 
my eyes and sometimes even then. Hence it is ex- 
tremely pleasant to detect the misdoings of others. A 
few days ago I encountered one which gave me joy, 
not so much because of its importance as because it 
gave me an excuse for hunting the original in the ob- 
scurity of the by-ways of biography and because of the 
evidence it affords of the impervious condition of mind 
of the ordinary British official. 

Almost every reader who is familiar with the his- 
tory of the earlier half of the nineteenth century knows 
of George Canning's celebrated rhyming despatch to 
his friend, Sir Charles Bagot, English Minister at The 
Hague. There was a dispute between England and 



56 

Holland — which was then represented by Falck — about 
various commercial questions, and Canning, Foreign 
Secretary, sent the despatch in cipher to Bagot. The 
formal despatches had been forwarded, but this one was 
added for the sake of pure fun. There was great trou- 
ble in reading it, but it was finally made out by a group 
of heavy-witted attaches, who thereupon gravely made 
it public without apparently becoming aware of its 
humorous character. Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer in his 
"Historical Characters" gives this version of it, which 
is usually accepted : 

"Dear Bagot, in commerce the fault of the Dutch 
Is giving too little and asking too much. 
So since on this policy Mynheer seems bent 
We'll clap on his vessels just twenty per cent." 

The witty and versatile statesman might well groan 
in his grave over such a mutilation of one of the few 
diplomatic jokes ever recorded; such a shameful ruin 
of a harmless jest. What Canning really wrote is set 
forth in Josceline Bagot's George Canning and His 
Friends (Vol. II, 321) as follows: 



57 

"Foreign Office:, 

January 31, 1826. 
Sir:— 

In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch 
Is offering too little and asking too much. 
The French are with equal advantage content, 
So we clap on Dutch bottoms just twenty per cent. 

(Chorus) Twenty per cent, twenty per cent. 

(Chorus of English Custom House Officers and French 

douaniers. ) 
(English) We clap on Dutch bottoms just twenty per 

cent. 
(French) Vous frapperez Falck avec twenty per cent. 

I have no other commands from His Majesty 
to convey to your Excellency to-day. 
I am, with great truth and respect, Sir, your Excel- 
lency's most obedient humble servant 

George Canning. 
His Excellency, the Rt. 

Honorable Sir Charles Bagot K. B." 

This is all very trivial, to be sure ; and it is a glorious 
waste of time to be occupied with it. Yet the stiff and 
formal despatches of that period are no less trivial to 
us now, albeit not nearly as amusing. There is an 
element of the heroic in the audacious attempt of the 



58 

Foreign Secretary to enliven diplomatic correspondence 
by facetious verse as well as to mystify thick-skulled 
representatives of His Majesty's government. In our 
own serious times such innocent fooling would end the 
career of a public man; John Hay would never have 
dared to indulge in like persiflage, and the imagination 
refuses to picture Philander C. Knox venturing upon 
such jocosity in his communications with Mr. Whitelaw 
Reid or the Minister to Germany. It would be con- 
sidered as criminal as to jest about reciprocity or the 
referendum. 

Every now and then one finds during his excursions 
in the remote corners of the library a new example of 
the antiquity of wise sayings attributed to eminent men. 
I used to think that Tennyson said a good thing when 
he made the observation so often accredited to him, that 
"it was well that the Carlyles married each other, for, 
had they married differently, there would have been 
four unhappy persons instead of two." But long before 
the domestic infelicities of the Carlyles had become the 
subject of gossip, Joanna Baillie had said, in The Match, 
"If they are together, two people may lead an uneasy 
life, to be sure; but it will in all probability save four 
from being in the like condition." It is quite possible 



59 

that Tennyson had read Joanna Baillie's works or some 
of them, for she was known and honored in her day, 
beloved and admired by Sir Walter Scott, and she sur- 
vived until 1 85 1. It was a case of unconscious con- 
versational plagiarism, and the responsibility for its 
perpetuation rests not upon Tennyson, but upon his 
friends who had probably never read The Match. Other 
poets have deliberately written down and printed their 
larcenies. "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," 
observed a famous poet, who had doubtless a faint 
recollection that many centuries earlier Seneca had said, 
"Nullum magnum ingenium absque mixtura dementice 
est/' and Aristotle had said it before him. Parentheti- 
cally, one may derive a lot of vicarious learning from 
the Commonplace Books of Southey, and gain much 
credit for being an "antiquarian," if indeed there is any 
credit about it, by filching from them judiciously. Who- 
ever is curious about the repetition of ideas and coin- 
cidences of thought in literature will find an extensive 
collection of examples in Clouston's Literary Coin- 
cidences, published twenty years ago, although many of 
those which are there cited are mere cases of the reitera- 
tion of commonplaces, and others are so shadowy that 



6o 

some effort is required to detect the resemblance. When 
Byron says in Mazeppa: 

"Where the Spahi's foot has trod 
The verdure flies the bloody sod," 

I refuse to believe that he was borrowing from 
Swift's Pethox the Great, where the Dean wrote : 

"Byzantines boast, that on the clod 
Where once their Sultan's horse hath trod, 
Grows neither grass, nor shrub nor tree." 

It is true, as Mr. Clouston says, that "human 
thought seems to move in certain grooves, and men 
whose minds are cast in a large and comprehensive 
mould generally think alike." 

We have often heard of the reply which the late 
Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll is alleged to have made to 
one who asked him how, if he had the world to make 
over, he would improve it, to the effect that he would 
make health catching instead of disease. Doubtless he 
never said it, but if he did he may have been recalling 
the argument of Gregorius Nyssenus that "sickness 
cannot be contagious because health is not." More 
probably, as Gregorius Nyssenus was not a "best 
seller" in Peoria, 111., he evolved it in his own mind 



6i 

without being aware that the idea, in a different form, 
had occurred to the mind of a godly Bishop in the 
fourth century. Yet again he may have discovered 
it in the same place where I found it, for I am ready 
to admit that I have never even seen a volume of the 
works of Gregorius, nor did I ever know personally 
any one who had. 

There was current at one time a popular anecdote 
of the late John Stetson, manager, to the effect that on 
one occasion he noticed a member of the orchestra sit- 
ting idly in his place, and upon inquiry was told that 
the idle one had "fifty bars rest"; whereupon Stetson 
remarked, with energy: "Well, he's paid to play, and 
he has got to play, and after the performance he can 
rest at as many bars as he pleases." In J. R. Planche's 
Recollections (1872), David Morris, proprietor of the 
Haymarket Theatre in the twenties, is reported as say- 
ing to a musician under similar circumstances : "Rest ! 
Don't talk to me about rest, sir! Don't you get your 
salary, sir ? I pay you to play and not to rest, sir ! Rest 
when you've done your work, and not in the middle of 
it." Planche adds that a similar tale is told about old 
Astley. Worse than this is the retort of Rev. Richard 
Harris Barham (miscalled "Thomas" by Planche) 



62 



apropos of a dispute between two archaeological fac- 
tions, to a man who remarked, ''Oh, we of the 



always hang together." Barham is made to say : "Ah! 
that's only metaphorically. I should like to see two or 
three of you hanging separately/' Possibly the genial 
Ingoldsby had never heard of Benjamin Franklin's his- 
torical bon-mot in reply to Harrison's appeal for 
unanimity at the time of the adoption of the Declaration 
of Independence: "Yes, we must indeed all hang to- 
gether, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." 

Almost every well-informed American knows now 
that Chief Justice Taney never said that "the negro 
had no rights which the white man was bound to re- 
spect" ; that Martin Van Buren did not promise, in his 
inaugural address or elsewhere, to "follow in the foot- 
steps of his illustrious predecessor"; and that General 
Taylor did not say at Buena Vista, "A little more grape, 
Captain Bragg," any more than Wellington said, "Up, 
Guards, and at them!" or Cambronne, "The Old Guard 
dies, but never surrenders," at Waterloo. The Duke's 
remarks on the occasion referred to were commonplace 
in the extreme, while Cambronne's could not have been 
reproduced in the New York Times. Of most of these 
fictions we are from time to time reminded by the news- 



63 

paper "antiquarian" when the unwelcome lack of mur- 
ders, accidents, or the mysterious disappearances of 
beautiful young ladies leaves a portentous void in the 
columns, which must be filled somehow, even from the 
well-thumbed compendiums of useful information with- 
out which no newspaper library is complete. It is surely 
better to disabuse the readers' minds of these common 
errors than it is to retail the old stories of Daniel Web- 
ster's intemperance, recently refuted by Professor Wil- 
kinson, or Polk's mendacity, proclaimed by the blun- 
dering and over-rated Von Hoist, or of the feminine 
disguise of Jefferson Davis when he was seized by the 
Union soldiers. Most of these falsehoods are the crea- 
tion of the high-minded Abolitionists of New England, 
who, like Garrison, pronounced the Federal Constitu- 
tion to be "a league with hell and a covenant with 
death," or who in 1856 — like the late Thomas Went- 
worth Higginson — believed the existing Union to be 
a failure and joined in a call for a Convention to con- 
sider measures for its dissolution. Thanks to these 
malevolent individuals, large numbers of our country- 
men continue to believe that Webster was generally 
drunk, that Polk was a weak and contemptible liar, and 
that Mr. Davis was attired in a hoop-skirt when he was 



64 

captured by Wilson's cavalry. They believe it because 
they have so often seen it in print; just as they believe 
that McClellan was wretchedly "slow" and utterly in- 
competent as a military commander because he did not 
crush the South in six months when it was strongest, 
while they exalt Grant, who took nearly two years to do 
it when the South was at its weakest ; or that Buchanan 
was a traitor, while one of his most trusted advisers, 
one Edwin M. Stanton, was a thoroughgoing Patriot, 
notwithstanding the fact that he was a rank "Copper- 
head" until he was taken into camp by that astute judge 
of human nature, Abraham Lincoln, and was made 
Secretary of War. 

Sometimes I wish that I could free myself from the 
propensity to rejoice in trifles; it is so much more noble 
and lofty to engage in the work of "reform" ; to be de- 
vising plans to get rid of this human nature of ours 
which has been such a burden to the race since the days 
of Eden — this unreasonable longing for apples, this 
partiality for the counsel of serpents in preference to 
that of the socialistic regenerators of all mundane things 
who are by habit gloomy, sour, and in a chronic condi- 
tion of ill-temper and dissatisfaction. It is noble, for 
example, to carry on by essays, speeches and legisla- 



65 

tion the war against political corruption ; the results up 
to the present time having been so eminently satis- 
factory. It is heroic to bring about — by essays, 
speeches and legislation — the annihilation of wealth and 
the abolition of poverty ; we are so much nearer the goal 
than we were in my boyhood when "one hundred thou- 
sand dollars" was a fortune. It is glorious to feel that 
you are the guardian of "the true interests of the peo- 
ple" and that "the grass will not grow at night unless 
you lie awake to watch it." And yet — it is very com- 
fortable to slumber occasionally and to let the grass 
grow according to its own nature, without our personal 
assistance ; to indulge in a little relaxation ; and to dally 
fondly with trifles unencumbered by the weight of an 
awful responsibility for the well-being of creation. We 
read and hear much about "broad-minded men" whose 
energies are given wholly to the work of making other 
people over again to suit their ideas of what men ought 
to be; but I have observed that, like the Croton River 
as it was in my childhood, where they are broadest they 
are also shallowest. The deep-minded man is not 
always finding fault with his fellow-countrymen, or 
their institutions, or their methods of life; his time is 
not given up exclusively to the exposure of the sins and 



66 

crimes of the community. A newspaper critic in San 
Francisco recently informed me that if, instead of deal- 
ing with autographs and Jeffrey and Dean Swift, I 
would tell a few of the things I had learned in Wall 
Street and some of the facts I gleaned while Receiver 
of the Metropolitan Street Railway, I would furnish 
"reading to sit up to." But I do not want to make peo- 
ple "sit up"; I would much rather make them doze a 
little with Jeffrey and the Dean than to be striving con- 
tinually for "progress," in whose name more crimes 
have been committed than were ever committed in the 
name of "Liberty." Roscoe Conkling sonorously de- 
clared that when Doctor Johnson said that patriotism 
was the last refuge of a scoundrel he was unaware of 
the infinite possibilities that lay in the word "Reform" ; 
and he might have added "Progress" as well. When a 
man is walking blindfold towards the edge of a preci- 
pice, he may suffer in time from a little too much 
"progress." The relish for trifles is not altogether 
reprehensible. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus observes 
with severity : "The spider is proud of catching a fly — 
so is one man of catching a hare, another of netting a 
sprat, another boars, or bears, or Sarmatians. Tested 
by philosophical principles, are they not brigands every 



6 7 

one ?" These were not the trifles which appealed to the 
soul of Marcus Aurelius, but no doubt he had a few 
of his own. Some men are proud of shooting lions and 
antelope — for scientific purposes, of course — and their 
pride may be pardonable, but that is no reason why we 
should all engage in the slaughter of lions and antelope ; 
there are numbers of other trivial amusements less 
sanguinary but more sedentary, like "pottering about" 
in the alcoves of the library. I prefer to lull my reader 
into repose rather than to make him ruin his health 
and impair his eyesight by "sitting up" to devour 
revelations of sin in Wall Street and in street railways 
— topics of such vital importance to individuals who 
never gambled in a broker's office or owned a share of 
stock in a railway company. Moreover, I confess that, 
as the "Needy Knife Grinder" of Frere and Canning 
replied to the inquiry of the Friend of Humanity, 
"Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir!" Let 
us have peace. The world is not as wretched as our 
"progressives" and reformers would have us believe. 
When Croaker in The Good-Natured Man spoke of our 
bad world, his wife said to him, "Never mind the world, 
my dear, you were never in a pleasanter place in your 
life"; and the capacity for this enjoyment of trifles is 
not the least of its pleasures. 



PHILOSOPHERS 



PHILOSOPHERS. 

An old friend used to regard it as a merciful dis- 
pensation of Providence that some men are willing to 
be physicians. Many of us wonder that the profession 
of medicine, the hardest worked profession of them all, 
should be attractive to anybody; but to my mind it is 
not as strange that men should voluntarily become doc- 
tors as it is that any of them should become philoso- 
phers. When I say "doctors," I mean, of course, what 
we ordinarily call "doctors," and when I say "philoso- 
phers," I am speaking not of "lovers of wisdom" in 
the broad sense, but of persons who devote themselves 
to speculative thinking about life in general and who, 
from the time of Solon to the time of Spencer, have 
never been able to agree upon a definite answer to the 
question, "What is philosophy?" It may be heresy to 
doubt if the world has enjoyed much substantial benefit 
from the labors of the philosophers, but there have been 
those who were rash enough to express such a doubt, 
braving the floods of withering scorn which poured 
from the "high thinkers" who dwell in clouds of 
abstractions and regions of intellectual gymnastics. It 



72 

is rash, however, to say that any innocent human effort 
is absolutely without advantage to mankind, and the 
person who would make such an assertion deserves to 
be described in the words which Hamlet applied to 
Polonius. Even the investigations of a Congressional 
Committee may be productive of something new, useful, 
or beautiful, and it is not easy to go further than that, 
in the spirit of charity for all. There may be comfort 
and consolation in perusing the lists of automobile 
owners vouchsafed to us by one of our most respectable 
newspapers, and of the guests "registered" at count- 
less summer hotels scattered from Maine to California. 
But it must be confessed that the philosophers often irri- 
tate us, for they look upon themselves and their pur- 
suits with a sublime satisfaction and arrogant conceit 
which exceed the limit of endurance. 

One of our most learned professors informs us that 
"the peculiar characteristics of philosophy are held to 
be its certainty, universality, independence, supremacy 
and a kind of divine character; the last characteristic 
makes it worthy of honor even by Deity itself/' This 
surely seems to be a little overwrought. If it might be 
permitted to avail of slang, we might say that it was 
"going it some." It certainly does not exhibit the deli- 



73 

cate modesty which is the attribute of the truly wise, and 
it makes the assertion of Papal infallibility a thing of 
inglorious insignificance. To that much-renowned per- 
son, "the average man," philosophy appears to be de- 
void of every one of the characteristics ascribed to it by 
Professor Ladd. When no two of its disciples are will- 
ing to concur about anything essential — even in the 
definition of terms — it surely lacks certainty, at least. 
Its apostles appear to be unanimous only in the enuncia- 
tion of imposing commonplaces. The late John Fiske 
declared with much profundity that "life, including also 
intelligence as the highest human manifestation of life, 
is the continuous establishment of relations within the 
organism in correspondence with relations existing or 
arising in the environment." After reading this, one 
is not surprised at the startling cross-reference said to 
have been discovered in a book catalogue: "God: see 
Fiske, J.," even if Mr. Roberts does speak of it as "a 
gem of absent-mindedness. " Fiske's dictum, we may 
readily believe, would not cause much heated debate; 
it is helpful, indeed, and vastly enlightening to the 
seeker after truth. It is nearly as consoling as that 
soul-satisfying assurance which we received from our 
college instructor, that "happiness is the harmony or 



74 

the result of the harmony of the susceptibilities of a 
sentient being and the objects which were created to 
gratify them. ,, The aspiring student who could not 
take fresh heart to go on cheerfully and confidently in 
his life-work after comprehending this embodiment of 
the wisdom of ages must be indeed a desperate scoffer 
and a hardened Philistine. The amount of enlighten- 
ment derivable from a proposition like that may justly 
be compared with the store of historical information 
contained in the brief but memorable deliverance of Mr. 
F.'s aunt : "When we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander 
was stole by tinkers." 

But the discussion concerning the fruitlessness of 
philosophy is a never-ending one, and it has been about 
as fruitless as philosophy itself, although we can per- 
ceive a distinct falling off in the volume of philosophical 
product. Against the sceptics, the philosopher trium- 
phantly quotes the saying of Aristotle that "If you for- 
bid men to philosophize, they will go on philosophizing," 
and one is tempted to reply, "You might as well tell us 
that if you forbid men to become intoxicated, they will 
go on getting drunk." The argument is a pretty feeble 
one, even for a philosopher; but we cannot fail to ob- 
serve that drunkenness has declined as well as philoso- 



75 

phy, and that men do not indulge now in the debauches, 
intellectual or physical, to which they were addicted in 
the olden days. 

Let me not be misunderstood; I am not presuming 
to find fault with pursuits which have for their object 
the improvement and regeneration of mankind, which 
I suppose to be the ultimate aim of philosophy, even 
though they may not give much promise of success. 
But if a man makes it his purpose to be honest, upright, 
and industrious, to cultivate the faculties he possesses, 
to make happy those about him, to obey the moral law, 
and to be a good citizen, guided by reason and con- 
science, he will accomplish more good in the world than 
the pretentious "reformers" and philanthropists who 
ever paraded ostentatiously their reforming and philan- 
thropic zeal, largely stimulated by the desire for self- 
advertisement. When a human being sets out with the 
notion that he is about to engage in something which 
is worthy of honor "by deity itself," he flatters himself 
overmuch ; he may better aim at doing something within 
his reach which will win for him the respect and confi- 
dence of his fellow-beings. 

It may not be quite fair to decry philosophy as it is 
called, merely because of the inconsistencies or imper- 



76 



fections of the philosophers themselves. We all realize 
that the science of medicine should not be disparaged 
because there have been some unworthy physicians, nor 
the science of law sneered at because there have been 
a few unworthy lawyers. But physicians do not ordi- 
narily attempt to lay down rules of moral guidance ex- 
cept so far as may be required for the preservation of 
health, nor do lawyers undertake to instruct their clients 
concerning the principles by which men's lives should 
be regulated except so far as their civil conduct needs 
regulation. It is expected of a Christian minister, who 
is a sort of Christian philosopher, that he should in some 
degree practice what he preaches, and there is good 
reason why all philosophers, Christian or pagan, should 
in their behavior set good examples to their brethren. I 
am not referring so much to metaphysicians, whose 
occupation is harmless enough, if, as Professor Ormond 
says, "all metaphysics arises* out of the question 
whether thought is adequate to the apprehension of 
reality." It is interesting to observe that Professor 
Ormond adds : "This question may be answered either 
negatively or affirmatively," and apparently it does not 
make much difference to mankind which answer is 
given. I am thinking more especially of those who 

* So in the text. 



77 

voluntarily assume the task of informing us how much 
better we and the world ought to be and how human 
society should be reconstructed so as to conform to 
their personal views. 

Luckily, the majority of these philosophers are not 
remembered very long, except by name and occasion- 
ally for some attractive quality of speech or style ; their 
teachings soon grow obsolete. There was a time when 
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the prophet and the seer of 
America, sometimes invading foreign lands, where he 
eventually accomplished the not very difficult feat of 
wearing out the patience of Carlyle, who evidently 
valued his friendship when at a distance, but not so 
highly when they were at close quarters. He certainly 
had a powerful influence in the primitive days before 
we had emerged from the limitations of provincialism, 
but it has diminished visibly and he has become almost 
a tradition. He survives purely in a literary way, for 
he had an artfulness of style and discourse. He under- 
stood how to veil the expression of a thought in a deli- 
cate fabric which made the commonplace charmingly 
mysterious, and he shrewdly refused to engage in argu- 
ment with those who disagreed with him — a method not 
infrequently adopted by the wily who know that if you 
make assertions and heed no objections you are fairly 



78 

sure of getting some one to believe you. It is signifi- 
cant that the man who, in 1838, announced that the 
office of the preacher was dying and the church totter- 
ing to its fall has ceased to maintain his power, while 
the church which he contemptuously rejected has sur- 
vived his repudiation and continues to be a living force. 
It is always easier to say pleasant things than un- 
pleasant ones. Those who insist upon the duty of 
"always telling the truth" — meaning what they may 
happen to regard as the truth — irrespective of their 
competency to decide, are usually very disagreeable 
people. But Emerson could not complain of frankness 
in the expression of views, for he proclaimed that "we 
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own 
hands; we will speak with our own minds." A critic 
once said of me that I was "never so sure and never so 
offensive as when I was wrong" — meaning, of course, 
as when he thought I was wrong. One may be as offen- 
sive in denying a thing because he happens not to believe 
it as another may be in asserting it because he does hap- 
pen to believe it. If no sufficient reasons are given by 
either of them, their contentions are fruitless. I fail to 
see why we should hide our real opinions, however un- 
popular they may be — that is, if we are not "running 



79 

for office." The man who has such perfect confidence 
in himself as to suppose that his judgments are final, is 
what Mr. Bumble said that, in certain contingencies, 
the law is; but these judgments may be good until re- 
versed by competent authority. I do not feel that I am 
offensive when I say that to me, at least, there seems 
to be little sincerity in Emerson's gospel; and nothing 
endures long in this world that is not sustained by sin- 
cerity. The lack of it is betrayed in mysterious ways 
which it is difficult to explain or to describe. I have lis- 
tened to a vigorous and eloquent argument, brilliant, 
deserving admiration, which failed to convince because 
the hearer could not resist the feeling that brilliant as 
the speaker was, there was no sincerity behind what he 
was saying. It is easy to suggest that the fault may 
be in the hearer ; but even so, the speaker is unsuccess- 
ful if he cannot correct that fault. 

Let me plead Emerson's behest about "speaking 
with our own minds" as some justification for saying 
that a careful observer, who is not blinded by the dis- 
ease of indiscriminating admiration, must be impressed, 
in considering his life, with the fact that like most 
apostles of individualism, he was disposed to depend 
upon other individuals and to get as much as he could 



8o 



from them for his personal benefit without exerting 
himself to any considerable extent outside of rhetorical 
fields. Emerson would have cut a sorry figure if he had 
practised literally and faithfully his gospel of absolute 
individualism. "Have no regard to the influence of 
your example, but act always from the simplest mo- 
tives," is one of his precepts. If he meant what he said 
he was advising men to act in accordance with the prin- 
ciples of the hyena or of the wild men of Borneo, who 
care nothing for their example and who act from the 
very simplest of motives. He recalls the sailor in 
Ruddigore, who always acted according to the prompt- 
ing of his heart, when it prompted him to do just as he 
wished to do. Another of his contributions to the stock 
of human wisdom is : "The great man is he who in the 
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the in- 
dependence of solitude. " This has a pretty sound, but 
are we to infer that the way to greatness is to shut one's 
eyes in a crowd and think of no one but self? At that 
rate, greatness is fairly cheap. Possibly it was meant 
only as a phrase. 

Mr. Ireland in his Biographical Sketch says of him, 
as if it were vastly creditable, that "it was a peculiarity 
in Emerson that the thing he most disliked was sick- 



8i 

ness, while disease he regarded with the strongest aver- 
sion." From this astounding revelation we are led to 
suppose that ordinary people are fond of sickness — by 
which Mr. Ireland doubtless means "illness" — and re- 
gard disease with positive affection. Many ardent self- 
lovers are sorely distressed at the sight of suffering be- 
cause it annoys them, disturbs their contentment, inter- 
feres with their personal comfort. It may have been 
so in Emerson's case, for we must assume that Mr. 
Ireland is not ascribing to him any singularity in dislik- 
ing his own sicknesses and being averse to his own dis- 
eases. This "peculiar" antipathy to the contemplation 
of illness does not appear to have led him to do any- 
thing to help the sufferers. In effect, he proclaimed the 
duty of selfishness, the ultimate development of the 
creed of laziness ; to that degree he was sincere. After 
the expulsion from Eden he would have used his "rich, 
baritone voice" and his subtle phrases in advising the 
stricken pair to gather fig-leaves at once, but he him- 
self would have sedulously refrained from gathering 
any, even for his own protection; he would have bor- 
rowed some from Adam. He seems to have been 
afflicted with a sort of constitutional indolence. In his 
younger days he was the pastor of a church, an office 



82 

which called for some effort, but he gave it up, osten- 
sibly because of a conscientious objection to the rite of 
the Lord's Supper, thereby ridding himself of an obliga- 
tion to do systematic work and assigning a reason which 
permitted no argument. He might well have placed his 
abdication on the ground that he was not fit for pastoral 
labor; his heart was not in it. The dying Revolution- 
ary veteran, who, it is related, was so dissatisfied with 
the "consolations" administered by the philosopher that 
he rose up from his bed saying, "Young man, if you 
don't know your business, you had better go home," 
was an accurate observer. Emerson, by his own show- 
ing, entered the ministry without any serious convic- 
tion, although it may be unjust to surmise that the 
pecuniary consideration affected his action. Indeed, 
one of his admirers applies to him the words used by Sir 
Leslie Stephen about himself, that "he did not discover 
that his creed was false, but that he had never really 
believed it." Sir Leslie, however, did not become a 
minister, while Emerson studied theology for six years 
before he became assistant to Rev. Henry Ware in the 
Second (Unitarian) Church in Boston. To say that 
after all this preparation he became a minister without 
a sincere belief in the creed he professed to teach, is 



83 

discreditable either to his honesty or to his mental 
capacity. It shows weakness either of intellect or of 
moral sense. The circumstances of his awakening to 
his error are not without significance. Fortunately for 
him, he had done what not a few philosophers are wise 
enough to do — he married a wife, of whom it may be 
said that, like Mrs. Pecksniff, "she had a small prop- 
erty." Upon her early demise — in February, 1832 — he 
came into the enjoyment of about twelve hundred dol- 
lars a year, and almost immediately perceived the ad- 
visability and propriety of abandoning the ministerial 
function. It may have been merely a coincidence; one 
of those which figure largely in cases of circumstantial 
evidence. Philosophers are supposed to have a lofty 
contempt for such a sordid thing as property, but the 
matter of his pecuniary profit appears to have been per- 
petually before his mind. Pointing to the pride of his 
orchard, he said : "That apple tree is worth more than 
my head to me. My income from the former is greater 
than the revenue from all my books." At one time we 
find him dwelling, not altogether unostentatiously, upon 
his poverty, alleging that he had only a house, a garden, 
an orchard, twenty-two thousand dollars in cash invest- 
ments, and an income of about eight hundred dollars a 



84 



winter from his lectures. Under the conditions pre- 
vailing in New England three-quarters of a century ago, 
he was rather well off than otherwise. He had his 
start with property which some one else had toiled 
for and accumulated for purposes not connected with 
Emerson's support. You may say, "Oh, he lectured," 
but it is only the echo of the remark of the Ant to the 
Grasshopper, "Oh, you sang!" He was as content that 
others should have labored for his profit as he was satis- 
fied to have others do the fighting for him, when in 1861, 
he said, at Charlestown Navy Yard : "Ah ! sometimes 
gunpowder smells good." That was the true philosophic 
spirit. He was several hundred miles away from the 
spot where gunpowder was burning and apparently 
gave no thought to the suffering and slaughter among 
those who were burning it. In his address on "The 
American Scholar," in 1837, he uncovered this pearl 
of thought: "If the single man plant himself indom- 
itably upon his instincts, and there abide, the huge 
world will come round to him." It might be supposed 
that this would depend somewhat upon the nature of 
the instincts. The "huge world" ordinarily has some- 
thing else to do than to be trotting about to suit the 
varying instincts of millions of mortals — some of them 



85 

being the reverse of sublime. It is true that for a 
while, the world seemed to have "come round" to 
Emerson, to feed on his flattery of the "individual 
man" who enjoys the delusion that he is and may 
continue to be self-sufficient, wholly independent of 
all other individuals. We have learned better; we 
know that such pseudo-individualism means only sav- 
agery; we have been taught by experience that sane 
independence is best secured by intelligent co-oper- 
ation ; not by the vague and incoherent speculations of 
the Transcendentalists, whose ill-fated experiment at 
Brook Farm effectually disposed of their impractical 
nonsense. 

In the Century for July, 1882, Emma L,azarus paid 
an elaborate tribute to Emerson, boasting that he 
founded no school, formulated no theory, and "ab- 
stained from uttering a single dogma." I do not know 
what she calls a "dogma." I had an idea that in its gen- 
eral sense it meant "a fixed opinion," at least that is one 
of its principal meanings. Emerson was going about, 
writing and speaking during all his active years, and 
it is dubious praise to say that he never uttered a fixed 
opinion. If that were true, what on earth was he talk- 
ing about? 



86 

Whether or not the eccentric Mr. Henry D. Thoreau 
may be regarded as a philosopher in a technical sense, he 
fancied that he was, and he was a devout disciple of the 
Sage of Concord. His views of life and of his duties in 
life were full of the spirit of his master. "Local as a 
woodchuck," according to John Burroughs, he had a 
literary faculty which is charming to many ; but he, too, 
was something of a poseur and understood the art of 
self-advertisement almost as well as a modern "pro- 
gressive" statesman. In the words of Lowell, he was 
"a man with so high a conceit of himself that he 
accepted without questioning, and insisted on our ac- 
cepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as 
virtues and powers peculiar to himself." He posed as 
an enthusiastic lover and observer of nature; but, as 
Lowell further points out, he was really no observer. 
"Till he built his Walden shanty he did not know that 
the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he 
had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon 
early familiar to most country boys. At forty, he 
speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, 
though one should have thought that its gold-dust of 
blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. 
* * * He discovered nothing. He thought everything 



87 

a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting 
of acorns and nuts by squirrels."* Burroughs, in his 
enthusiastic eulogy of him, feels obliged to admit that 
"considering that Thoreau spent half of each day for 
upwards of twenty years in the open air, bent upon 
spying out Nature's ways and doings, it is remarkable 
that he made so few real observations. * * * He has 
added no new line or touch to the portrait of bird or 
beast that I can recall — no important or significant fact 
to their lives." And Burroughs easily discerns the 
reason; he had no self-f orgetfulness ; he was thinking 
more about Henry D. Thoreau than about anything 
else ; if he looked into the glass of Nature, he could see 
only himself. He was a monument of egotism. Hav- 
ing neither persistency nor purpose, he regarded or 
affected to regard all success as contemptible. 

His hermit life at Walden has been one of his prin- 
cipal "properties," as a stage-manager might say; but 
slight investigation discloses how much imposture there 
was about it. The gentle but commonplace Donald 
Mitchell, amiably and conventionally flattering to all 
writers dealt with in his American Lands and Letters, 
expresses the general idea when he says of Thoreau at 

*My Study Windows (1871), 200. 



88 



Walden that "he built his own house under the pines, 
measuring costs by pennies." What he really did was 
to avail himself largely of the property of others in 
orthodox philosophical style. He began character- 
istically by "borrowing Alcott's axe." He took posses- 
sion of land belonging to Emerson. He procured planks 
by "dismantling a shanty" which he bought from an 
Irishman. It is true that he performed the work of 
constructing the cabin, having no other occupation and 
being bent on possessing a retreat where he would be 
under no necessity of doing anything for the benefit of 
any one else; but he had the help of friends, including 
Alcott and George William Curtis, in "raising it." He 
was, however, only an amateur hermit, for Channing 
tells us that "he bivouacked there and really lived at 
home, where he went every day," the "home" being 
that of his father. Mr. William Morton Payne, in his 
entertaining book about "Leading American Essayists" 
— to which I am indebted for many of my facts — while 
quoting these words of Channing, thinks that they were 
not "literally true," because, I infer, the "hermit" did 
not go home "every day" ; but it is plain that the "cabin" 
was only a picnic place of resort, of the kind much 
favored in these times by busy men who seek to escape 



8 9 

for a brief season the daily cares of life. I wish I knew 
whether he ever returned Alcott's axe. Several years 
he passed as an inmate of Emerson's house, paying for 
his support, as well as I can make out, by "playing with 
the kittens" ; and Emerson submitted to it meekly, pos- 
sibly because he was incapable of the effort involved 
in getting rid of his non-paying "boarder/' In 1848, 
Thoreau, at the age of thirty-one, went back to the 
house of his father, the worthy maker of lead-pencils, 
"and remained under the family roof for the rest of his 
life." 

Thoreau explains the motive of his "hermit" mas- 
querade by saying: "I wanted to live deep and suck 
out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spar- 
tan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a 
broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, 
and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be 
mean, why then to get the whole and genuine mean- 
ness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if 
it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able 
to give a true account of it in my next excursion." This 
seems to the ordinary mind to have a nauseous flavor 
of absurd self-sufficiency — to learn "life" by ignoring 
the existence of one's fellow-beings, to evade the re- 



9o 



sponsibilities of life, and then to proclaim a decision on 
the whole great subject as if it were final and conclu- 
sive. To ignore our brother-men, to refuse obedience 
to law, and to defy the rules of decent society, may be 
characteristic of the unwhipped schoolboy, who usually 
outgrows such childish diseases when he assumes the 
toga of manhood; but in a mature man they appear to 
be quite pitiable and altogether contemptible. The arro- 
gant person who does such things may justly be called 
a savage, but there was a time when the "noble savage" 
was regarded with some affection and great admiration 
by a considerable number of educated people. Lowell 
in My Study Windows sums up the Walden matter 
when he says : "Thoreau's experiment actually presup- 
posed all that complicated civilization which it theoreti- 
cally abjured. He squatted on another man's land; he 
borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his 
mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, 
his hoe, all turn State's evidence against him as an ac- 
complice in the sin of that artificial civilization which 
rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. 
Thoreau should exist at all." 

Burroughs thinks that Thoreau "had humor, but it 
had worked a little; it was not quite sweet." A humor 



9i 

that is sour must be a very bad humor ; but Burroughs 
has about as much humor as one of his own wood- 
chucks, and is not a competent judge. Lowell says that 
"Thoreau had no humor," and most of us will regard 
him as better qualified to pass judgment. The fact is 
that no great egotist, absorbed in self-admiration, ever 
has any sense of humor, for if he had he could not take 
himself so seriously. 

But these examples of minor personal failings of 
some of our American preachers are of no serious im- 
portance in comparison with the revolting spectacle of 
Jean Jacques Rousseau ; yet there is a college professor 
who talks about "the sincerity of Rousseau, who 
preached community of privilege and universal duty" 
and numbers him among "those who trust in con- 
science." He probably meant the conscience of other 
men, for if Jean Jacques had any he must have been 
profoundly miserable. And we are told in the Gallic 
prattle of Van Laun that "he preaches a return to 
nature, independence, earnestness, passion, and effu- 
sion, a manly, active, unselfish and happy existence in 
the open air and sunshine." He was doing all this, 
probably, while he was sending his illegitimate off- 
spring to the Foundling Asylum. As well might 



9 2 

Judas Iscariot preach the duty of loyalty, or Benedict 
Arnold the nobility of patriotism. Rousseau also 
had the literary trick, and he made full use of it; 
but Simond, one of those who admired him, admitted 
that 'Very possibly some of the fundamental opinions 
he defended so earnestly, and for which his disciples 
would willingly have suffered martyrdom, were orig- 
inally adopted because a bright thought, caught as 
it flew, was entered in his commonplace book." The 
revelations of his private life — his abominable treat- 
ment of his poor father, for example, and the story 
of the ignorant servant-woman and her five children 
— are fit only for the pages of the professional pre- 
server of unsavory scandals, who writes about the 
"loves" of famous men and women and revels in the 
shameful details which ought to be forgotten. We 
may not reasonably expect to get pure water from a 
filthy jug. The infamy of Rousseau is so well under- 
stood that until I read the balderdash of the Princeton 
Professor about his "sincerity" and his "conscience," I 
supposed that it was universally recognized by decent 
people. The philosophy of Rousseau — "a crude philoso- 
phy with its bad method and its false and precipitous 
solutions," as Mr. Bodley, the historian of the French, 



93 

justly called it — has ceased to be of interest, except to 
the student of eighteenth century history and literature ; 
but as long as the world loves to be deceived by hum- 
bug, his false gospel will survive in some form — a gos- 
pel which Carlyle describes as "a Gospel of Brotherhood, 
not according to any of the Four Old Evangelists, and 
calling on men to repent, and amend each his own 
wicked existence, that they might be saved; but a Gospel 
rather, as we often hint, according to a new Fifth 
Evangelist, Jean Jacques, calling on men to amend each 
the whole world's wicked existence, and to be saved by 
making the Constitution." 

It was once common to refer to men like Hobbes and 
Bentham as the "selfish philosophers," because their 
systems proceeded upon the idea of the paramount influ- 
ence of self-interest in man. Strangely enough, the lives 
of the "selfish" ones were far more pleasant to contem- 
plate than those of the sentimentalists who profess to be 
so altruistic and to have such a high opinion of the 
merits of men in general. It is true that both Hobbes 
and Bentham were vain, apparently confident that they 
had "a monopoly of all truth and that whatever was 
not of their own manufacture was contraband"; but 
Hobbes was personally attractive and it was said of 



94 

him that he was "exceptionally good-tempered perhaps 
for a philosopher," while Bentham lived a retired life, 
absorbed in methodical labor and study, loved by those 
about him. The "unselfish" philosophers have been un- 
selfish only in theory. I do not know that anything is 
to be gained by scolding them. It is just as well to 
leave them to themselves while they "travel over a road 
strewn with the wreckage of discarded theories and 
broken-down opinions," as even Professor Creighton 
describes their unattractive pathways. One is tempted 
at times, however, to rebel against their arrogant, over- 
weaning, contemptuous self-conceit, their absurd pre- 
tensions, and their unwarranted assumption of lofty 
virtue and superiority. 



THE COLLECTING OF BOOKS 



THE COLLECTING OF BOOKS. 

Not long ago there was a book sale in New York 
which, for several days, aroused the attention of the 
press and the public, chiefly because the auction prices 
attained an aggregate of very nearly a million dollars. 
We were regaled with the usual homilies concerning 
the joy of the poor man in the possession of his few 
hardly-won volumes and the comparatively insignificant 
pleasure of the rich man lavishing his thousands upon 
a single book; but the principal topic appeared to be 
the enormous amount of money paid for the prizes and 
the foresight of the former owner who bought for 
rather small sums what was sold at a huge profit. The 
Hoe sale did not throw much new light on what a cer- 
tain writer has called "collectaneomania." It afforded 
only another proof of the well-known fact that the com- 
peting bidders who flock to the sale of famous collec- 
tions always raise the standard of values. As Mr. 
Slater says, "When first-rate libraries are dispersed, 
prices rule high," and he adds that "Cautious buyers 
avoid such sales; they prefer to angle in less troubled 
waters, and are wise." It is not so with the man who 



9 8 

can afford to entrust to his agent unlimited power to 
bid, and to give $50,000 for a Mazarine Bible, when 
less than twenty-five years ago a perfect copy brought 
only £2,650. There is distinction in owning the most 
expensive volume in the world. But Dives is often the 
despair of the impecunious book-fancier. Whether it 
be true that the wealthy man has less delight in his 
costly books than the poor man has in his cheaper ones, 
I do not know ; but it is certain that as long ago as the 
seventeenth century, Thomas Baker, an "unceasing col- 
lector," had his fling at what has been called "purse- 
ability" when he wrote to Humphrey Wanley : "I begin 
to complain of the men of quality who lay out so much 
for books and give such prices, that there is nothing 
to be had for poor scholars, whereof I have found the 
effects. When I bid a fair price for an old book, I am 
answered the 'quality' will give twice as much, and so 
I have done." This, in effect, is what the English often 
say now, when they speak sorrowfully of "those 
Americans." 

It may seem presumptuous for any one who is a 
mere lover of books to attempt to treat of collecting 
and of the collector even in a brief and desultory fash- 
ion ; yet perhaps he may be better qualified to deal with 



99 

the fascinating subject than one who is himself a mem- 
ber of the inner brotherhood. A man may, of course, 
be an ardent bibliophile, and even a bibliolater, without 
deserving the name of "collector," although it must be 
confessed that bibliophilism and bibliolatry lead to col- 
lecting almost as surely as all those things abhorred 
by my ancient Professor of Moral Philosophy used to 
"lead to Pantheism"; but bibliophilism and collecting 
are by no means synonymous, and a bibliophile is no 
more a collector than a "collection" is a library. The 
lists of members of our Book Clubs and Bibliophile 
Societies contain, if I am not mistaken, the names of 
many who make no pretensions to the rank of collector. 
Possibly it is because of their modesty, for all book- 
lovers and nearly all lawyers are afflicted with that 
overestimated virtue. As I venture to enroll myself 
in both of these divisions of mankind, it will readily be 
perceived that as far as modesty is concerned, I am 
worthy of what our English cousins used to call "a 
double first-class." 

In a volume published some years since, the title of 
which my shrinking diffidence does not permit me to 
mention, I remarked with much apparent profoundity 
that the appellation of "collector" carries with it "the 



IOO 



suggestion of a wise and discriminating man who 
gathers the old and the rare, who selects only the best 
examples; and who knows precisely what he wants." 
There is only a modicum of truth in that rather dog- 
matic assertion, because a genuine collector, a choice 
specimen of the charming genus, is often unwise and 
undiscriminating, gathering not only the old and the 
rare but the new and the common, all the more lovable 
for his insatiate thirst for books, and wanting "every- 
thing in sight," if one may be allowed to indulge in that 
condensed expression of thought which the narrow 
purist calls slang, but which broader-minded men em- 
ploy when they wish to drive an idea home to a reader 
or to a listener. 

But whether the collector be fastidious in his taste 
and dainty in his appetite, or greedy, gormandizing, 
omnivorous and cormorantish, he is an object of inter- 
est, for he arouses in some observers a feeling of envy 
and of admiration, mingled with a slight infusion of 
awe, and in others who are unfortunately lacking in 
that catholicity of spirit which the judicious commonly 
possess, an emotion of pity, an indulgent tenderness, a 
sort of kindly commiseration. Carlyle once wrote to 
some youthful gleaner of autographs, sneeringly char- 



101 

acterizing that pursuit as a "poor" one, a judgment in 
which many will heartily concur, more's the pity, and 
many, but not so many, have a like estimation of the 
hobby of collecting books. A newspaper reviewer — 
that most airy and affectedly omniscient of creatures — 
recently said of a writer of books about books, that "he 
does seem to be more interested in books than in life, 
which is a bad thing." It was a fatuous remark, and if 
he had been considering a treatise on geometry he 
might with equal propriety have said that the author 
was less interested in life than in mathematics. It is, 
however, an illustration of the attitude which persons of 
moderate intelligence are apt to assume towards those 
who rejoice in books and who love to bring together in 
fond companionship the best of them, creating Carlyle's 
"true university." There is no incompatibility between 
an interest in life and an interest in books. It may be 
that a few of the famous collectors lost in their biblio- 
philic zeal an interest in what is called life; a concern 
for the happiness of their fellow-beings; a desire to 
leave the world better for their living in it; but as an 
amiable writer has said: "In these busy days most 
bibliophiles and book collectors are men of affairs." In 
my own small circle of acquaintances I know men who 



102 

are kings in the world of finance, men who are among 
the great builders and constructors, men who are lead- 
ers in their professions, who are at the same time 
among the most enthusiastic lovers of books. What of 
life could that shallow critic have seen or known which 
had not been comprehended by these men of stalwart 
intellect, of broad culture, who find in their beloved 
libraries that relief from the strain of great responsi- 
bilities which helps them to perform their tasks suc- 
cessfully and gives them strength for the daily con- 
flicts in the world of business, the battles of the courts, 
the strife of human endeavor ! 

As a rule, these accumulators of books and ancient 
manuscripts are a long-lived race. There was the Right 
Honorable Thomas Grenville, statesman and collector, 
whose fame still dwells among bookmen, who died 
at ninety-one, leaving to the British Museum a library 
of over twenty thousand volumes which had cost him in 
those less expensive days more than £54,000. Panizzi 
said of it that except the library of George III the 
Museum had never received so important an accession. 
When we recall that there were among the vellum 
copies a Mazarine Bible of 1454, an Aldine Dante of 
1502, and a marvelous Vitruvius of Giunta dated in 



103 

1503 — but the catalogue would rival that of the ships 
in the Iliad — we may imagine the rest. Grenville 
used to boast that when he was in the Coldstream 
Guards and under twenty-five — for he entered Parlia- 
ment at that age in 1780 — he "bid at a sale against 
a whole bench of Bishops" for some rare Bible. It is 
delightful to think of nearly seventy years of collect- 
ing, especially when we remember that during much 
of the time he had abundant leisure, being splendidly 
paid by the State for doing nothing of much account — 
which was the reason assigned by this man, who surely 
deserved the title of "Right Honorable," for giving his 
books to the nation instead of bestowing them upon 
his great-nephew, the Duke of Buckingham. It is no 
discredit that he held a sinecure in that century. 

Another collector who attained a patriarchal age 
was the gorgeous William Beckford, who came into a 
fortune of £100,000 a year and who spent right royally 
not only his income but his principal during his eighty- 
five years. Not a small part of it was lavished upon 
a library which as lately as 1882- 1883 came to the 
ultimate fate of libraries, the auction room, under the 
auspices of those princes of the book-selling realm, 
Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, who still continue to 



104 

be, all things considered, the greatest book auctioneers 
in the world. It was just a century after the time 
when, if tradition does not mislead us, Beckford wrote 
Vathek in a single sitting of three days and two nights. 
I wonder if anybody reads Vathek in these twentieth 
century times. I own that I never read it myself, but 
we have all read about it so often that we feel almost 
as intimate with it as we do with Pilgrim's Progress, 
which is but an honored name in this generation. Pos- 
sibly I am incautious in making that assertion, be- 
cause a dozen men may cry out that they have read 
every word of Bunyan's immortal masterpiece; but 
no one can say truthfully that it is read by the many, 
as it once was. It has become a book for the student 
of literary antiquities. 

So preservative of health is the pastime — or, if the 
solemn person prefers it, the occupation — of book col- 
lecting, that almost to the day of his death Beckford 
seemed to be strong and vigorous, showing few signs 
of advanced years. His son-in-law, Alexander, tenth 
Duke of Hamilton, reached the same great age, dying 
in 1852 at eighty-nine. The library of Beckford was 
sold in 1822 to John Farquhar for £330,000, not in- 
cluding, however, some choice treasures; and these, 



io5 

with what he acquired later, passed to Beckford's son- 
in-law, the tenth Duke of Hamilton, and were sold at 
Sotheby's in 1881-84 for £73,551 18s. I am particular 
about the shillings. The Duke was himself a collector, 
and his own printed books were sold at Sotheby's in 
1884 f° r £12,892 12s. 6d. His manuscripts were dis- 
posed of separately, most of them going to the Royal 
Museum in Berlin at a price of £70,000. Among them 
was the celebrated Golden Gospels, inscribed in gold 
letters on purple vellum, at one time the property of 
Henry VIII, and also the Divina Commedia of Dante, 
with illustrations attributed to Sandro Botticelli, valued 
at £5,000. Those which the Royal Museum did not 
purchase were sold at Sotheby's in 1889 for £15,189 
15s. 6d. Our poor modern millionaires pay much higher 
prices now for books of far less rarity and distinction. 
Such statistics bring to our saddened minds the lines 
of that delightful preserver of all good things about 
books, Andrew Lang, who sings of 

The Books I cannot buy, 

Their phantoms round me waltz and wheel, 
They pass before the dreaming eye, 

Ere sleep the dreaming eye can seal. 



io6 

While we are talking of sales, it may not be amiss 
to recall that the library of Charles, Earl of Sunderland 
and second Duke of Marlborough, brought, in 1881-83, 
no less than £55,581 6s. ; and it is said that the Althorp 
Library, formed originally by George John, Earl Spen- 
cer, was sold in 1892 for a sum not far short of 
£250,000. 

Grolier had come to his eighty-sixth year when he 
died among his books at his Hotel de Lyon; and An- 
tonio Magliabecchi, who read every catalogue and knew 
the actual situs of almost every book of importance 
in his day, passed out of life in his eighty-second year, 
''dirty, ragged and happy as a king," according to the 
Eltons. It was of Magliabecchi that the familiar tale 
is told about his answer to the Grand Duke's inquiry 
concerning a certain work: "The only copy is at 
Constantinople in the Sultan's library, the seventh vol- 
ume in the second book-case on the right as you go in." 
Thomas Caldecott, John Bellingham Inglis, and John 
Wingfield Larking at ninety, Sir Christopher Wren at 
ninety-one, Samuel Rogers at ninety-two, and John 
Payne Collier at ninety-four are only a few additional 
examples of the well-known truth that the collecting 
of books is the preservative of life as the printing of 



107 

them is the "art preservative of all arts." Study the 
record of "English Book Collectors" as written down 
by Mr. Fletcher, and you will be forced to admit that 
the old-fashioned collectors were hopelessly addicted to 
the habit of octogenarianism. It may not be worth 
our while to search into the reasons why, but we may 
conjecture that the placid and peaceful retirement of 
the book-lover may be more conducive to long life than 
the contests and struggles of the world, with their 
strain upon the vital force and their concomitant waste 
and dissipation. The contentment of noble minds is 
not an insignificant factor in the prolonging of human 
existence. 

They are generous, too, these lovers of books. 
There was Nicolas Fabry de Peiresc, whose books 
"came rolling in on every side"; who always had at 
least one binder in his house; and who, despite his 
profuse purchases, left only a small collection because 
he lent so much and gave away so many. The great 
Jean Grolier was bountiful in his gifts, and the book- 
man will recall the inscription "Et Amicorum" stamped 
on many of his books immediately after his name, to 
show that they belonged to his friends as well as to 
himself, although some students have reached the con- 



io8 

elusion, by a course of reasoning which does not con- 
vince me, that he was merely indicating the possession 
of duplicates. Richard Heber, the most liberal in his 
loaning of volumes from his immense assemblage, 
aroused the enthusiasm of Dibdin — which, perhaps, was 
not a difficult task — and his willingness to share his 
treasures with others evoked from the pedantic doctor 
a glowing tribute. "This," says Dibdin in his Biblio- 
mania, referring to the liberality of Heber, "is the pars 
melior of every book collector and it is indeed the better 
part with Atticus. The learned and curious, whether 
rich or poor, have always free access to his library. 

The volumes, open as his heart, 
Delight, amusement, science, art, 
To every eye and ear impart." 

The learned author's verse is not of the highest 
order of poetry, but his intentions were excellent, even 
if he was one of the most slipshod of bibliographers, 
whom it is customary to hold up to ridicule in these 
days. Lloyd Sanders accuses him of having achieved 
the feat of making a list of the important books in Lord 
Spencer's library containing scarcely a single correct 
entry. But I regret that Mr. Roberts should go so 
far as to call him "the devil-hunting Thomas Frognall 



109 

Dibdin" and to characterize his account of the Althorp 
Library, of which he was the first librarian, as "flatu- 
lent and sycophantic records. " Heber, lovers of Walter 
Scott will remember, was the man to whom the sixth 
canto of Marmion was dedicated, and one never hears 
of him and of his generosity without being reminded 
of Scott's lines in the dedication: 

"But why such instances to you 
Who, in an instant, can renew 
Your treasured hoards of various lore, 
And furnish twenty thousand more? 
Hoards, not like theirs whose volumes rest 
Like treasures in the Franch'mont chest. 
While gripple owners still refuse 
To others what they cannot use." 

The Parisian book-stall men of the Rive Gauche — 
who can forget the charm of a ramble among their 
pleasant shelves, spread out along the quaisf — are not 
likely to lose the memory of the kind spirit which 
prompted Xavier Marmier to leave a thousand francs 
to be expended "by these good and honest dealers, who 
number fifty or thereabouts, in paying for a jolly dinner 
and in spending an hour in conviviality and in thinking 
of me." "This," adds the amiable Marmier, "will be 



no 



my acknowledgment for the many hours I have lived 
intellectually in my almost daily walks on the quays 
between the Pont Royal and the Pont Saint-Michel." 
It is in this way, says M. Uzanne, that memories are 
kept green. It is sad to reflect that in recent years those 
grazing grounds for collectors have lost much of their 
former charm. The book-stall men used to be con- 
siderate indeed, as I can testify. I bought from one 
of them an ancient copy of Voltaire's Henriade, con- 
taining a fascinating plate, for a few centimes. It was 
unbound and shabby, but it was curious and would 
have brought at least twenty times the amount if it 
had been sold in this country. 

While it is pleasant to think of the free and boun- 
tiful ways of the men about whom we have been chat- 
ting, I am not sure that it is wise to lend carelessly. It 
affords a temptation to the unscrupulous and it en- 
courages those who should be sternly suppressed, the 
piratical purloiners of books, the shameless filchers of 
personal property. The dangers of injudicious lending 
must not be underrated, and many a vacant space on 
the shelves of kind-hearted bookmen testifies that it is 
not always prudent to yield to friendly impulse and 
that there is a disposition on the part of the unworthy 



Ill 



to convert the books of others to their own use. As 
Laman Blanchard wrote in his Art of Book-Keeping, 

"How hard, when those who do not wish 

To lend, that's lose, their books 
Are snared by anglers — folks that fish 

With literary hooks, 
Who call and take some favorite tome 

But never read it through, 
They thus complete their set at home 

By making one on you." 

With all his attractive qualities, the collector has 
been the victim of the modern nomenclature con- 
structed on a basis of Greek, and he has been held up 
to ridicule and scorn under the title of "bibliomaniac," 
one which, nevertheless, men like Dibdin have gloried 
in and exalted. It is a much-abused word and it is 
often applied without just discrimination. "If a man 
spends lavishly on his library," said Ruskin in Sesame 
and Lilies, "you call him mad — a bibliomaniac — but you 
never call one a horse-maniac, though men ruin them- 
selves every day by their horses, and you do not hear 
of people ruining themselves by their books." Ruskin, 
who might well have written "hippo-maniac," never 
heard of course of the sad fate of that unfortunate who, 



112 

some years ago, was accused of robbing extensively for 
the purpose of obtaining funds wherewith to purchase 
costly editions de luxe, falsely so-called, and whose 
downfall brought to the inevitable auction-block all his 
loved accumulations. They were sold at prices ab- 
surdly disproportionate to their cost ; his Cooper, which 
cost him $3,300, going for $561 ; his Dumas, costing 
$6,000, for $660, and his Waverly, costing $5,100, for 
$510. Seldom has there been such a pitiful book- 
disaster. He was a bibliomaniac as defined by Jean 
Joseph Rive, quoted by Isaac D'Israeli in his Curiosities 
and again in Burton's Book Hunter, who said "a biblio- 
maniac is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders 
faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy." 
D'Israeli himself in his essay on "The Bibliomania" 
calls that malady "the collecting of an enormous heap 
of books without intelligent curiosity," which, the dear 
old fellow adds, "has, since libraries have existed, in- 
fected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves 
acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves." 
He condescends, however, to joke mildly about it, say- 
ing: "It was facetiously observed, these collectors are 
not without a Lock on the Human Understanding," and 
he chuckles in a foot-note over the unfortunate French- 



U3 

man who translated Curiosities of Literature, and with 
that excusable inability, shared with the Scotchman, 
to see the point of an English jest, rendered the pas- 
sage — "mettant, comme on l'a tres judicieusement fait 
observer, Tentendement humain sous la clef." Many 
book-devotees will remember the verses of Doctor John 
Ferriar, whose epistle to Richard Heber, styled "The 
Bibliomania/' was published in 1909, beginning 

"What wild desires, what restless torments seize 
The helpless man who feels the book-disease." 

Those who are not acquainted with it will find Ferriar's 
poem in a neat little volume called Book Verse, edited 
by Mr. Roberts and published by Elliot Stock in 1896, a 
charming collection designed to gladden the heart of 
the fortunate possessor. 

The term "bibliomaniac" has come to mean a good 
deal more than is asserted by either Rive or DTsraeli, 
and every one, whether poor or purse-heavy, whether 
he blunders or not, whether or not he has a curiosity, 
intelligent or otherwise, is called a bibliomaniac if he 
has what his fellow-beings consider to be an overween- 
ing regard for books, a glorious passion for the owner- 
ship of them and a preference for them over all other 



ii4 

earthly things. But the bibliophile, defined by the 
aforesaid Abbe Rive as "the lover of books, the only 
one in the' class who appears to read them for his own 
pleasure," may well entertain the opinion that there is 
good foundation for the charge of mania against some 
of the fraternity whose freaks and oddities have made 
them famous — or infamous as you may prefer — and 
even against those who have never attained notoriety. 
There is scarcely any limit to the whims and caprices 
of collectors. Mr. Rees speaks of a sale in 1883 by 
Messrs. Puttick and Simpson, of "A Unique Collection 
of Illustrated Matchbox Covers." I have told elsewhere 
a story — which happens to be untrue — of a learned 
judge who had the fad of gathering old almanacs, and 
there have been people who cherished the labels on wine 
bottles. Passing by such hobbies as those concerning 
miniature books — Sextodecimos et Infra according to 
our much-honored bookman of Gotham, William Lor- 
ing Andrews — and of first editions, because one might 
fill volumes with reflections on themes like those, think 
of the condition of mind of him who collects title-pages ! 
Yet he flourished luxuriantly not so very long ago. 
Students of book history are acquainted with the tale of 
old John Bagford, shoemaker and biblioclast — the latter 



n5 

word is unknown to the Century Dictionary — whose col- 
lection of title-pages and fragments filled sixty-four 
folio volumes, or, as Mr. Blades will have it, over one 
hundred volumes. One can never be absolutely certain 
about those statistics, and when I have been fortunate 
enough to enjoy glimpses of the wonderful agglomera- 
tion under the dome which looks out upon Great Rus- 
sell Street, Bloomsbury — surpassed only, in respect to 
numbers, by the Bibliotheque Nationale — I have had 
no leisure to count Bagford's books, but I sympathize 
with Blades when he proclaims in righteous indignation, 
that "when you find the colophon from the end or the 
'insignum typography from the first leaf of a rare 
'fifteener' pasted down with dozens of others varying 
in value, you cannot bless the memory of the antiquarian 
shoemaker, John Bagford." 

Dibdin says of Bagford that he was "the most 
hungry and rapacious of all book and print collectors, 
and in his ravages he spared neither the most delicate 
nor costly specimens." I was surprised to see this quota- 
tion badly mangled by no less a person than Richard Gar- 
nett in that work of inestimable value, the Dictionary of 
National Biography; but perhaps he took it from an- 
other edition of Bibliomania than the one which I am 



n6 



permitted to pore over and to fondle. Bagford pre- 
tended that his depredations, his conscienceless mutila- 
tions of old volumes, were designed to aid him in his 
contemplated General History of Printing which he 
never finished, but I think it was only a manufactured 
excuse ; and he collected even covers, bosses and clasps. 
He had numerous followers, but Mr. Slater calls our 
attention to the fact that collections of book-titles are 
not much in evidence of recent years, regarded as 
things rather to be ashamed of, and he remarks that 
"it is abundantly manifest that the wicked man hath 
turned away from much of his wickedness." I will not 
take up the mooted subject of "Grangerizing," for it 
would require a volume to deal with it adequately; I 
will merely confess that I am a besotted and benighted 
disciple of the Shiplake parson. 

The devotee of strange and curious bindings affords 
occasionally some testimony tending to prove that a 
hobby otherwise harmless may be carried to the border- 
land between sanity and the reverse. Percy Fitzgerald, 
the industrious compiler and book-maker, tells us that 
Mordaunt Cracherode — the father of an eminent col- 
lector, the Reverend Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode — 
wore one pair of buckskin breeches exclusively during 



ii7 

a voyage around the world, and a volume in the son's 
collection, now in the British Museum, "is bound in a 
part of those circumnavigating unmentionables. " We 
learn, moreover, that one offspring of the first and great 
French Revolution was the grim humor of binding books 
in the skin of human beings. There is an octavo volume 
of the trial of Cordes for the murder of a young woman 
named Martin — the Red Barn murder, so often told of 
in books of criminal trials — bound in the murderer's 
skin, tanned by some surgeon. Mr. Slater describes a 
copy of Johnson's Lives and Adventures of the Most 
Famous Highwaymen, Murderers and Street Robbers — 
a sweet and enlivening work, if we may judge of it by its 
title — bound in human cuticle taken from a criminal exe- 
cuted at Tyburn. Owing either to dampness or to some 
imperfection in the process of curing, it sweats what 
seem to be great smears of blood. It must be a cheerful 
ornament in a snug and cosy library. 

The story of this appalling book brings to my recol- 
lection a friend's account of a book which is said to be 
in the possession of a gentleman in New Orleans. A 
physician of that city intending to prepare a treatise 
on yellow fever, heard of a work on the West Indies, 
published about the middle of the eighteenth century, 



n8 

in which the first account of that dire malady was given 
to the world. He gave an order to the Napoleon of 
books, as he has been styled, the famous Quaritch, who 
discovered a copy in the heart of Spain. This copy had 
a number of maps and plates, whose blank backs were 
stained with curious brown spots. The owner, after 
careful scrutiny detected on one of the soiled pages the 
words "Sang de Marat." It is said, but I will not vouch 
for the truth of it, that Marat was intending to visit 
the West Indies in the hope of restoring his shattered 
health, and it is believed that when he was stabbed by 
Charlotte Corday — "stewing in slipper bath," with 
"strong, three-footed stool for writing on" close by him, 
according to the historian whose name need not be given 
for the style bewrays him — he may have been reading 
this very book; and "when his life, with a groan, gushed 
out, indignant, to the shades below," those pages may 
have received their sanguinary baptism. I have not seen 
the book and I do not comprehend why the maps and 
plates should have been the sole recipients of the blood 
of Marat, as would seem to be the case; but while the 
volume must be quite gruesome in its suggestions, it 
has surely an association which entitles it to be possessed 
in a dark corner, to be exhibited only to those who ap- 



ii 9 

proach a book with a dignified and becoming reverence. 
It must be a melancholy but interesting piece of prop- 
erty. 

I have in my library an extra-illustrated copy of 
Dowden's Shelley containing a lock of Wordsworth's 
hair and one of Southey's. In looking at them, one al- 
ways feels as if he were in the very presence of the 
illustrious dead. There is a funereal taint about them 
by no means agreeable, like that which clings to the 
bindings of the Cordes book and the Highwaymen's 
biographies. I do not rejoice over such mortuary relics ; 
I would much prefer to own George Napier's copy of 
the book about the dwarf Jeffrey Hudson, bound in a 
fragment of Charles the First's silk waistcoat, or the 
Duke of Roxburghe's collection of pamphlets about 
Mary Tofts (who pretended to be confined of rabbits), 
which is appropriately dressed in rabbit skin. 

It has been said and written countless times that the 
collector delights above all things in the making of 
"lucky finds," in "picking up" for a trifle some unique 
volume, and he dreams of such good fortunes as in 
childhood we used to dream of finding money. The 
"find" must as a rule be associated with a small price, or 
it loses its distinctive value. There are, however, but 



120 



few authentic records of these happy discoveries, and 
as a recent writer has observed, whenever one begins 
to read of them he invariably encounters the same an- 
cient fables, like the Old Hungerford Market tale and 
the story of Dame Juliana Berner's Boke of St. Albans 
in Thorneck Hall. I have long indulged in the pleasing 
hope that somehow and somewhere I myself might, in 
my wanderings, achieve something in the way of a 
"find" whereof during the remainder of my life I might 
boast, with that peculiar self-satisfaction exhibited by 
those who congratulate themselves on the making of a 
good bargain. My nearest approach to it was in Rome 
when in one of the shops where the innocent American 
purchases what he fondly believes to be antiques, there 
chanced to be, among the rubbish of shabby vases and 
broken statuettes, a casual volume in old mottled calf, 
with red edges, lonesome and desolate in the midst of 
the dubious bric-a-brac. After a peep at the title and 
the fly-leaf, I pocketed it with glee, and the proprietor, 
more interested in selling his alleged antiquities than 
in "mere literature," accepted an insignificant number 
of lire with apparent satisfaction. It was a copy of the 
first edition of the Tancrede of Voltaire, not particularly 
scarce, it is true, but it was the copy which the author 



121 

presented in 1761 to the famous lawyer-dramatist of 
Venice, Carlo Goldoni, whose marble statue looks out 
upon the Ponte Alia Carraja in Florence, and it bears 
upon the last page, in Goldoni's handwriting, the words, 
"Proprieta dell' avocato Carlo Goldoni, Veneto." This 
is a very trifling and insignificant "find," scarcely de- 
serving the name, and I mention it chiefly because of 
its loneliness. 

Once upon a time, if further personal reminiscence 
may be pardoned, I was the victim of a pleasing delusion 
which occasionally affects the man who forgets that 
what was rare may suddenly become common by the 
appearance of copies formerly unknown. I had read 
of the scarce first edition of that small pamphlet of 
seventy-one pages, the operetta of Dickens, that is to 
say: "The Village Coquettes: a Comic Opera in Two 
Acts; London, Richard Bentley, 1836," and had heard 
of prices of £30 and £40. When I "picked up" one- 
clean, uncut, even unbound — for a paltry £5, my sur- 
prise was tempered with natural delight, until I learned 
that not long before my unexpected good fortune, "a 
mass of waste paper from a printer's warehouse was 
returned to the mills to be pulped," as Mr. Roberts 
relates in The Book Hunter in London, "and would 



122 

certainly have been destroyed had not one of the work- 
men employed on the premises caught sight of the name 
of 'Charles Dickens' upon some of the sheets." In 
this way nearly a hundred copies of "The Village Co- 
quettes," in quires, unbound, came into the market — 
and mine was one of them. It was like Andrew Car- 
negie's boasted "mansuscript" of old Doctor Smith's 
"America," of which there are at least fifty extant; only 
I found out my error and I fancy that the library- 
founder is still in happy ignorance of the truth. 

Much has been written of the wanton extravagance 
of book collectors; of the squandering of their scanty 
means in the acquisition of curiosities without sub- 
stantial value; and of their depriving themselves of 
even the necessities of life in order to gratify their 
unholy passion for choice books. Pretty pieces of fic- 
tion have been published which have this idea for their 
motif. The collector's wife, unsympathetic and sorely 
afflicted, grieving over her ragged babes and lamenting 
the vagaries of her spouse, is a familiar character in 
imaginary chronicles. There is but a slight foundation 
for these fables, and the collector's wife is usually as 
enthusiastic — almost — as he is about the fascinating 
pursuit, often urging him to increase his store; but I 



123 

will own that sometimes, although not very often, the 
purchase of a long-coveted volume incidentally involves 
an investment in a Japanese sword-guard, a precious 
bit of faded tapestry, a new dress or in a hat the 
like of which is not preserved in the British Museum. 
Observation teaches one that, excepting the very rich 
men who are well able to afford to buy Mazarine (or 
Gutenberg) Bibles, Shakespeare folios and Golden Gos- 
pels, the collector is extremely prudent in his expen- 
ditures. "Carefully and judiciously pursued," says the 
gentle Mr. Rees in his Pleasures of a Book-Worm, 
"the collecting of books is not expensive and is likely 
to ruin no one." The world at large is fond of cherish- 
ing delusions and of perpetuating fallacies; for which 
reason the general public wholly overestimates the folly 
of the book-buyer. The public judgment is not in- 
fallible, and hence I think we should not disturb our- 
selves unduly about it. 

As now and then there are great misers, there are 
once and awhile men who seem to aim only at amassing 
an enormous number of books; men like Magliabecchi, 
who lived in a kind of cave made of piles of books, 
covering floor, bed and all the house with books. When 
he wished to sleep he would repose in a sort of wooden 



124 

cradle, lined with pamphlets, which he slung between 
his shelves, or he would throw a rug over the books 
on the floor and stretch himself upon them. Heber 
bought libraries without seeing them, and at the sale 
of his collection in 1834 and succeeding years, 119,613 
volumes were disposed of, realizing £56,774. He is 
said to have collected in England alone 127,500 volumes 
and he probably owned at one time between 145,000 and 
150,000 books. That is too many for genuine interest 
and enjoyment. But Heber pales in the presence of the 
Frenchman Boulard, the greatest buyer of old books 
during the last century, who "bought books by the 
metre, by the toise, and by the acre, and who left 
300,000 volumes." There are not many persons so 
unreasonably covetous: the Miser Helluo Librorum 
is more frequently encountered in literature than in 
actual life. It must be owned, however, that the temp- 
tation to increase one's stores is hard to resist when 
the catalogues are so seductive ; the shelves must always 
be a little overcrowded. Abraham Hayward probably 
invented the story about Madame de Genlis who, it 
was said, kept her books in detached book-cases, the 
male authors in one and the female authors in another, 
because, as Lord Lyndhurst suggested, she did not wish 
to add to her library. Most of us cannot be so heroic. 



1^5 

Mr. A. P. Russell in his attractive book, In a Club 
Corner, quotes the story of the Oriental king whose 
library was so large that it required one hundred persons 
to take care of it and a thousand dromedaries to trans- 
port it. He ordered all useless matter weeded out and 
after thirty years' labor it was reduced to the capacity 
of thirty camels. Still appalled by the number of vol- 
umes, he ordered it to be condensed to a single drom- 
edary load, and when the task was completed, age had 
crept upon him and death awaited him. I do not at- 
tempt to explain the moral, for every one will explain 
it to suit himself. I believe, however, that when the 
private library is swollen to an extent which forbids 
an intimate personal relation between the owner and 
each particular volume, it ceases to be what it ought 
to be, a source of comfort and of consolation, a precious 
possession, whose value is not to be measured in mere 
money. 

There is a temptation to ramble aimlessly through 
the broad field in which for so many centuries the 
book collector has disported himself and which has been 
explored with such diligence that it is not unlike the 
surface of our terrestrial globe, trotted over so thor- 
oughly that few nooks and corners remain undiscovered 
and untrodden. With the enormous increase in the 



126 

production of books — they appear so profusely that we 
are likely to suffer from a fit of literary indigestion — I 
fancy that before this century is much older the old- 
fashioned, all-absorbing collector may be destined to 
join the ranks of the disappearing fauna, like the bison, 
a victim of the disastrous effects of civilization. Yet 
there will always be a few who will cling to the tradi- 
tions. They will preserve the traits and characteristics 
of the earnest enthusiasts whose names are cherished 
in the hearts of all who regard the book as a thing 
apart from the mean and sordid in life, men about 
whom the elder D'Israeli wrote and the fantastic and 
inaccurate Dibdin prattled so voluminously. They will 
not be concerned chiefly about the value of their hoards 
in the market-place; they will have, it may be, a gentle 
and pardonable vanity in the ownership of some treas- 
ure which others cannot procure; they will be proud 
of their possessions and a little scornful of the Philistine 
who is ignorant of their merit ; but they will be, as they 
have always been, happy, kindly, and fond of research 
in the records of the past; not strenuous or overeager 
in the pursuit of fame or of fortune, but useful in their 
modest way, sympathetic and full to the brim with love 
for their fellow-men. For no man can be a true lover 
of books who does not also love his brothers. 



REFLECTIONS OF A RECEIVER 



REFLECTIONS OF A RECEIVER. 

In some other paper I have referred to the obser- 
vation in the San Francisco Bulletin that if the present 
writer should "tell us a few of the things he had learned 
in Wall Street, and some of the facts he gleaned while 
Receiver of the Metropolitan Company, then there 
would be reading to sit up to." Incited by this kindly 
scribe, but with no expectation or intention of inducing 
nocturnal perturbation of mind on the part of the gentle 
reader, I am led to bestow upon those members of 
the community who are capable of keen intellectual en- 
joyment a few reflections arising out of four years of 
experience as a Receiver of some lines of street railway 
in the City of New York. I know well that the tale of 
a Receiver could be unfolded with far more effective- 
ness and skill by a rival Receiver, justly regarded as 
"a man of letters," whose epistolary accomplishments 
have made of Chesterfield a faded tradition, of Junius 
a puerile scribbler, and of Madame de Sevigne some- 
thing no better than the modern Dea ex machina, the 
lady manipulator of a type-writing machine. From 
his keen-pointed pen would have proceeded pages 



130 

rivalling the disquisitions of De Quincey on "Murder 
Considered as One of the Fine Arts," or confessions 
as soul-stirring as those of the immortal Jean Jacques. 
The future may, however, have in store for us a "His- 
tory of the Decline and Fall of the Third Avenue Rail- 
way Company," which will rack with envy the shade 
of Gibbon and may live to be numbered among the clas- 
sics of the Twentieth Century. Let us be hopeful. 

Upon assuming the robe, or perhaps one might say 
with more accuracy the linen-duster, of a Receiver, the 
first thing which was brought most distinctly to my 
attention was the persistence of a simple form of 
jocosity manifesting itself in the remarks of nine out 
of ten of those who continued to honor me with their 
acquaintance. I have never met a like unanimity con- 
cerning a jest since I ceased to be a resident of the vil- 
lage formerly known as Sing Sing and was greeted 
almost daily by the monotonous inquiry as to how long 
I had been "out." The spirit of Momus or of the late 
Joseph Miller seemed to move each merry friend to in- 
form me that "a receiver is as bad as a thief." This, 
coupled with the production in the public prints of 
divers weird representations of my humble counte- 
nance in company with that of my honored associate, 






I3i 

served for a time to cheer my drooping spirits, but it 
also reminded me as I rode — free of charge— in my 
majestic trolley-car that, like the Roman General cele- 
brating his triumph in his less imposing chariot, I was 
merely mortal. I thought of that remark of Cosmo de 
Medici, which Bacon called "a desperate saying," that 
"Holy Writ bids us to forgive our enemies, but it is 
nowhere enjoined upon us that we should forgive our 
friends." 

About the same time I became aware of the infinite 
capacity of the human mind for finding fault. Really, 
it is natural enough to find fault, for there is no more 
delightful method of flattering one's vanity. It demon- 
strates the clearness of vision and perspicacity of mind 
which enable the fault-finder to detect and to denounce 
the fault, and it is attended by the pleasing implication 
of the ability of the finder to discover and apply the 
remedy. It will be a melancholy day for the greater 
number of our intelligent population when it is no 
longer possible to find fault with a common carrier. A 
common carrier is the pariah of modern civilization, 
contemned and despised by society. He does not usually 
suffer much pain, for he is generally a corporation, and, 
according to an ancient saying, "hath neither a body 



132 

to be kicked, nor a soul to be damned," and I once 
thought that his unpopularity was largely due to his 
corporate' character. I was undeceived ; it was because 
he was common and a carrier. At first it was quite dis- 
heartening to behold all mankind, with mouth open, 
pouring forth torrents of abusive criticism, and to re- 
flect that the voice of the People, while theoretically 
vox Dei, frequently sounds like something quite differ- 
ent; but after a little, those of us who do not intend to 
run for office reach that happy state when the universal 
bray loses its power to disturb our digestion or to im- 
pair the flavor of our after-dinner cigar. 

Another interesting discovery was that of the fatal 
propensity of individuals with foreign names to sus- 
tain personal injuries curable only by a liberal use of 
large quantities of the admirable currency of our glori- 
ous Republic. The facility with which those whose 
names end in "off," "ski," "stein" and "heimer" con- 
trive to fall off, or under, or into street cars, or get 
put out or otherwise maltreated without any fault of 
their own, may be compared only with the ease with 
which they recover, almost by a miracle, from such 
dreadful complaints as "traumatic myositis," after a 
single application of the wonderful greenback-salve, or 



133 

so much of it as may be allowed to them by their 
attorneys; a sort of salvage as it were. This leads to 
a tale told among lawyers, of a Hibernian plaintiff, 
formerly a client of the present Chief Judge of the 
Court of Appeals, who recovered a large verdict against 
a street railway company. After an affirmance in the 
highest court, he received only a small portion of the 
amount awarded by the jury, and could get no satis- 
factory explanation. Finally he procured a copy of the 
opinion of the court, and after reading it carefully he 
observed at the end the phrase : "All concur. Cullen, 
C. /.., taking no part." "Ah, bedad!" he exclaimed — 
Irishmen in stories always say "bedad" — "I knew it; 
Ed. Cullen wouldn't take any part! If he had, I sup- 
pose there wouldn't have been a divil of a cent left for 
me." 

We entered upon our labors with a serene and inno- 
cent confidence in our ability to satisfy the demands 
of the most exacting. Our motto was, "We aim to 
please." We had been taught that "charity" is the 
greatest of all good things, and we know that Benezet, 
one of the best men that ever lived, used to say that the 
highest act of charity was to bear with the unreason- 
ableness of mankind. But in course of time we began 



134 



to comprehend the reasons why many years ago Mr. 
William H. Vanderbilt made a certain remark about the 
public, forcible but not polite. We soon discovered that 
our patrons were divided into two great classes — those 
who thought our cars too hot and those who thought 
them too cold. Some citizens growled sullenly at a 
feeble attempt of ours to enforce compliance with the 
law that prohibits smoking on rear platforms, while 
others denounced us bitterly for not enforcing it to 
the letter. Along in the early spring we had timidly 
ventured to put in service a few open cars, and a 
dozen persons assailed us violently for so doing, while 
another dozen wrote scorching letters to us to up- 
braid us for not putting on more. The pet griev- 
ance was that cars would not stop to take on passen- 
gers when, after a block in the traffic, it became neces- 
sary to restore the normal headway in order to fur- 
nish accommodations for the greater number. A 
good second, however, was the outcry against being 
required to take another car when there had been 
an accident to the one on which the offended noble- 
man happened to be riding. The subject of "flat 
wheels" also elicited much vociferous complaint, nearly 
all the complainants being wholly ignorant of what 



135 

a "fiat wheel" really is and of what causes it. Bond- 
holders were clamorous because conductors "knocked 
down" fares — according to the custom of conductors 
from the very beginnings of conducting — and scolded 
us soundly for not preventing it; while others took 
pleasure in directing our attention to that form of 
peculation, as if they held a patent for discovering it 
and as if we had never given it any thought whatso- 
ever. Others still were severe about the bad manners 
of our said conductors, surprised, no doubt, that the 
three thousand or more of those long-suffering func- 
tionaries were not recruited from the alumni of our 
universities or the circles of the "four hundred." One 
gentleman, angry to the extent of several pages of 
manuscript, was bitter because there had been tendered 
to him in change what he was pleased to call "five grimy 
pennies." Saddest of all was the disillusionizing dis- 
covery that the mass of the people, the fount of all law 
and justice, the honest public, so severely righteous 
over the sins of the predatory capitalists, considered 
the evasion of payment of fare as commendable and 
praiseworthy; upon the theory, possibly, that as all 
things belong to and emanate from the people, it is not 
theft when they steal from themselves. For this rea- 
son, probably, the placarding of the eighth command- 



136 

ment, resorted to by one Receiver, did not appear to 
have any noticeable effect. Indeed, a man of large 
experience in street-railway operation informs me 
that, with all the outcry about the thefts of the poor 
conductors, carefully compiled records show that the 
dear public steals at least four times as much. We had 
a practical illustration of popular morality the morning 
after we began operating the "pay-as-you-enter" cars 
on Madison Avenue; we were obliged to put twenty-five 
extra cars on the Lexington Avenue line to provide for 
the overflow. The triumph of ingenious patience in 
fraud was achieved by a woman who passed off a trans- 
fer ticket on a certain day in April, 191 1, which had 
been issued on the corresponding date in 1905, having 
waited six years for that April day to fall on the same 
day of the week! I can imagine the lady hoarding the 
precious treasure; taking it from time to time from its 
place of deposit in order to gloat over it, and finally 
attaining the summit of human happiness by consum- 
mating the long cherished design and defrauding the 
creditors of an insolvent company out of the princely 
sum of five cents. The ticket was photographed and 
filed in court as an exhibit tending to prove the lofty 
standard of integrity prevailing in the metropolis of 
America. 



137 

Vigorously assailed because the tracks were in bad 
condition, we set to work at the earliest practicable 
time to repair them. This rendered it necessary to pile 
up some rails and other articles temporarily in the 
street. Instantly a worthy lawyer wrote to us that we 
had wilfully obstructed the roadway in front of his 
house, when there was a vacant lot across the way in 
front of which we could easily have stored the ma- 
terials. An hour or two later another wrathful writer 
informed us that we had "purposely placed in front of 
his house a heap of rails and paving stones, when there 
was a vacant lot adjoining his premises in front of 
which it might just as well have been deposited." De- 
pressed in mind, I wended my way that noon to the 
Down Town Club to restore my spirits by a little health- 
ful refreshment, and as I entered I was hailed by a 
friend who said, "Hay! I want to make a complaint 

" I turned upon him fiercely. "Don't tell me," I 

cried, "that rails have been piled up in front of your 
house when there is a vacant lot " "Why," he ex- 
claimed, in some astonishment, "that was just what I 
was going to say !" 

Looking back over the past, I am unable to recall 
that any human being ever said, orally or in print, a sin- 



138 

gle kind or encouraging word about us. Sometimes we 
received messages commending the politeness of a con- 
ductor,' but these were like angel's visits ; they bright- 
ened our lives but for a brief season. For these much- 
abused conductors we learned to have a deep sympathy, 
sharing, as we did, their uniform unpopularity. It was 
a lesson in patience to see one of them struggling with 
a mob of women shoppers on Twenty-third Street; a 
liberal education in philosophy to behold them beset 
from morn till midnight by a horde of careless, selfish, 
unreasonable and often insolent people; expected to be 
always courteous and ready to impart information on 
almost every conceivable subject; blamed for every- 
thing that went amiss, and abused for merely obeying 
orders; blamed for delays for which they were in no- 
wise responsible; blamed for opening a window and 
scolded for shutting it; blamed now for starting the 
car too slowly and now for starting it too quickly; 
blamed for not knowing how to direct an inquiring 
female to the address of some shop-keeper ; blamed for 
not stopping to let off a lady who, at Grand Street, had 
asked to be set down at West 47th Street; blamed for 
being unable to supply change for a ten-dollar bill; 
blamed for asking passengers to "move up in front," 



139 

as well as for permitting the rear of the car to be 
crowded; blamed for letting people get on when the 
car was full and blamed for not stopping to take on 
some more when every strap was adorned with a cling- 
ing traveler. It would seem that the public expected 
to obtain the services of a Chesterfield, a Mezzofanti, a 
Chevalier Bayard and a Solomon, all rolled into one 
individual, for the sum of $2.60 a day. I began to think 
that his woes were greater than my own, and he cer- 
tainly was paid less for enduring them; but one day a 
famous banker and magnate called upon me and re- 
quired me to redeem, personally, a counterfeit fifty-cent 
piece which had been foisted on him by one of these self- 
same conductors. This affliction was almost too much 
to bear; but true to our motto, I complied without a 
murmur. 

It is almost needless to say that at the outset of our 
Receptorial career we came into immediate contact with 
the majority of the People as represented by the Public 
Service Commission of the State of New York in the 
First District. We were new at the business; had 
almost as little knowledge and experience of it as they 
had themselves. They were just then threatening to 
do some direful deed, I forget exactly what, and I 



140 

waited upon them to beg them for a little time in which 
to get our bearings. They were affable — suspiciously 
so; they' fell upon my neck, metaphorically speaking. 
They assured me that they would withhold their mighty 
hand and would never, never do that deed without fur- 
ther ample notice; and almost as soon as I had shaken 
from my feet the sacred dust of their sanctuary — they 
did it. This led me to repose the most unlimited confi- 
dence in their later assurances, which was never mis- 
placed; for they continued thereafter to fall upon me 
with energy and promptness — if not upon my neck, upon 
some other valued portion of my corporosity. To this 
treatment my associate and I submitted with becoming 
meekness; content to learn the nature of their decrees 
from the newspapers before receiving their official man- 
dates ; and actually chuckling with uncounterf eited glee 
— mind, I did not say "ghoulish" — when they sternly 
ordered us to "increase the service" on Madison Ave- 
nue by running a less number of cars than were already 
in operation on that particular thoroughfare. Even 
when, by a complication of accidents, one of our elec- 
tric cars ran away and collided with another, both 
being empty, and the P. S. C. sternly required us to in- 
form them "what steps, if any, we were taking to pre- 



141 

vent a recurrence" of the event, we straightway took 
all the steps we could think of and solemnly promised 
that it should never happen again. 

It was curious what a maw these gentlemen had 
for statistics; an unholy craving, a cormorantish hun- 
ger, a Gargantuan appetite ; they were manifestly bent 
upon making figures in the world. All imaginable in- 
quiries, calling upon us for figurative responses, were 
showered upon us day by day. I have an impression 
that they wanted to know how many red-headed con- 
ductors and motormen we had on the Eighth Avenue 
line ; how many times an hour we were cursed by people 
who could not get a car to stop on the wrong corner; 
how many women a day alighted from the cars the 
wrong way; and if we would not arrive at a proper 
basis of "amortization" by multiplying the car-mileage 
by the gross earnings, dividing the result by the num- 
ber of bad nickels received per diem, and subtracting 
the amount of the fares which the conductors accident- 
ally forgot to "ring up" during the "rush hours." They 
were great on "amortization" — as if the property was 
not already dead enough, financially, to satisfy the most 
progressive of statesmen. I never did set much store 
by statistics. It never really concerned me whether 



142 

a greater number of people came over the bridges from 
Brooklyn to New York in a day than returned to 
Brooklyn the same day, because I was morally con- 
vinced that they must have gone back by some other 
way or on some other day, or eventually there would 
be no people left in Brooklyn — a contingency too hor- 
rible to contemplate. The value of statistics is forcibly 

illustrated by an incident related by Judge L . A 

western town undertook to ascertain, by a careful study 
of its record of arrests, the comparative percentages 
of criminality among the different races represented in 
its population. They discovered that there was such and 
such a percentage of Italians, of Hungarians, of Scan- 
dinavians, of Irish, of native Americans, and two hun- 
dred per cent of Persians. It turned out that there 
was only one Persian in the place and he had been ar- 
rested twice. 

One form of expression used by the Commission in 
their affectionate and familiar correspondence with us 
we found of considerable comfort. Whenever anyone 
addressed to them a complaint or a suggestion relative 
to the railway, they transmitted it to us at once with 
the remark that "it may be an isolated case or it may 
be due to some defect in your organization." Not being 



143 

aware of any serious defect in my own organization 
and being absolutely positive that there was none in 
that of my stalwart and warm-hearted associate, I usu- 
ally elected to consider it "an isolated case," especially 
when one kind and thoughtful gentleman proposed that 
we should indicate by a chalk line the sweep of the 
curve described by the rear platforms of our "pay- 
as-you-enter" cars as they swung from Park Avenue 
into Forty-second Street, and we were duly notified 
that "it might be an isolated case" and all the rest of it. 
But we considered it most urbane on the part of the 
commissioners to give us our choice in the matter, and 
endeavored to make some sort of sense out of it as we 
always did, with varying success, out of all their nu- 
merous recommendations. 

In the early days of their dominion the commission- 
ers became possessed of the favorite idea of amateurs, 
that the ne plus ultra of street-car management is to 
"provide a seat for every passenger." Now every one 
except an amateur knows that it is comparatively an 
easy thing to furnish a seat for every passenger, but 
extremely difficult to persuade him to sit in it. The 
mischief arises largely from the fact that, although the 
people as a whole are theoretically omniscient, inerrant 



144 

and infallible, the several units of which they are com- 
posed are frequently thoughtless, generally unreason- 
able and always in a hurry. Each man, woman and 
child wants a seat in the first car that makes its ap- 
pearance. In order to attain the ideal, there must be 
(i) a seat, (2) a fairly patient passenger, (3) a line 
of railway, (a) free from interfering trucks and coal- 
wagons, (b) having cars not subject to the ordinary 
vicissitudes of car life, (c) having a power plant which 
can never by any possibility get out of order, (d) with 
conductors and motormen exempt from all human de- 
fects or frailties. This combination is rarely secured. 
It is strange, by the way, how a human being may 
be simply perfect in private life but invariably becomes 
in the mind of the public a criminal and an enemy of 
mankind when he is once transformed into a motorman. 
This popular estimate of him — which is as wrong as 
popular estimates are apt to be — is encouraged by the 
habit of the police to arrest the motorman whenever 
anyone is injured, even when an intoxicated gentleman 
becomes suddenly weary and lies down to rest in front 
of a swiftly moving car; or a wandering infant, by 
abruptly changing its line of progress, rambles directly 
in the path of a car without giving a moment's warning 



145 

of its intention. It makes a decent man's blood boil 
to think of the atrocious injustice of thus putting upon 
an innocent person the stigma of arrest and arraign- 
ment in a police court — an outrage impossible in a coun- 
try like England and almost peculiar to an alleged "free 
country" like our own, where one-half of the population 
seems to be engaged daily in arresting and indicting 
the other half, and "probing" and "grilling" have 
come to be the national games. But all this, I confess, 
is irrelevant to the seat question. 

Thanks to the commissioners, we were often enabled 
to afford the spectacle of one or two cars crowded to 
the steps, followed by a procession of others only half 
filled and of others still wholly empty. According to 
the gospel of statistics, with ten cars having thirty-six 
seats each, three hundred and sixty passengers should 
each have had a seat; but when three hundred and 
sixty passengers insist on boarding five cars with only 
one hundred and eighty seats, statistics receive what 
the scoffers call a hard jolt and are temporarily knocked 
out, as it were. 

The principle of the Public Service law is fairly 
sound and the law itself is an excellent one — in principle 
— but it has some weak features which may in time be 



146 

eliminated, if the subject is dealt with intelligently. 
The troubles which have attended its execution have 
been caused mainly by lack of practical wisdom on 
the part of its administrators. The problems presented 
to them have been grave and perplexing — too grave 
for satisfactory solution by doctrinaires or by ama- 
teurs. It is no disparagement of the members per- 
sonally to say that, in the beginning, they were not 
eminently fit for their task. It was one which could 
be well performed only after long and systematic study 
and training. Men are not created with an inborn 
capacity for directing and regulating systems of pas- 
senger transportation in great cities as the Receivers 
well know, or for managing the financial affairs of 
the corporations which have them in charge; yet the 
commission was expected to do both, without experi- 
ence in either field. To expect five men, selected almost 
at random, to do it successfully is as unreasonable as 
it would be to put musical instruments in the hands 
of fivt persons ignorant of music and ask them to 
perform the great quintet of Schumann without even 
a rehearsal. 

It is one of the traits of the American to fancy that 
he is entirely competent to decide vexed questions of 



147 

law without legal education ; to teach in colleges with- 
out preparation; and to perform the operation for ap- 
pendicitis without any knowledge of surgery. It is 
magnificent, but it has its drawbacks. We learned 
during the Civil War that we could not make successful 
commanders by adorning men with epaulets and calling 
them Major-Generals — even politicians like Banks and 
Butler. Abernethy "spoiled a hatful of eyes" in learn- 
ing to operate for cataract, and no one can measure 
the amount of havoc done in perfecting the instruction 
of untrained commissioners. 

Then, too — and I say it with all respect — it was a 
mistake to approach the consideration of their prob- 
lems in a spirit of hostility to the men who were 
endeavoring in good faith to discharge their duties not 
only to the owners of the property but to the public 
as well. It must be remembered that for four years 
the principal street railways of New York have been 
operated under the direction of a court having regard 
to the interests of the city and of its people as well as 
to those of the large body of creditors whose money 
is involved and who were in nowise responsible for 
any of the acts which made the companies bankrupt. 
These agents of the court, having no personal concern 



148 

in the affair other than to obey judicial decrees and 
to do what is reasonable and proper, were justly entitled 
to the same presumption of fairness and disinterested- 
ness as was accorded to the commissioners themselves. 
We should have had the intelligent co-operation of 
these public officers instead of their ill-disguised enmity, 
and should not have been subjected to the impertinences 
and insults of their petty subordinates. It is not a 
good way, if you wish to be helpful, to issue a peremp- 
tory order to do a certain thing and call upon the 
victim to appear before you to show cause, if possible, 
why that thing should not be done. To be frank, one 
of the misfortunes has been that the commissioners 
stood too much in awe of a populace misled by false 
guides into the belief that the Receivers and the Court 
were merely the representatives of the old corporations 
and of mercenary plutocrats. Nothing could be fur- 
ther from the truth. There was never any good reason 
why the commission, instead of being a hindrance, 
should not have been a help to the street railways as 
the commission in Canada is to the railways of the 
Dominion — a body which does not consider the ad- 
vertisement of its members in the newspapers to be 
the chief purpose of its existence. I am glad to say 



149 

that in course of time our commissioners or some of 
them learned that we were not as bad as they originally 
thought we were. 

If these gentlemen had been confronted by the neces- 
sity of raising money to defray the enormous expenses 
for interest, rentals, taxes, wages, supplies, repairs, 
renewals, and operation generally, they would soon 
have found that it is far easier to make orders than it 
is to carry them out. It is all an illustration of the 
truth of what one of our best practical railway man- 
agers said years ago, that the power to control business 
enterprises without financial responsibility is one of the 
most dangerous that can be entrusted to any man or 
set of men. 

It would not be very surprising if the increasing ten- 
dency to disregard property rights and to appropriate 
the possessions of corporations should result in what is 
termed "municipal ownership" of street railways, and 
perhaps, in the course of time, free transportation of 
all passengers. This would be infinitely pleasing to 
the multitude, for it would give the "bosses" a delight- 
ful amount of patronage and the large expenses would 
fall wholly upon the luckless taxpayers. With a Legis- 
lature made up as our own usually is, and the almost 



unlimited powers vested in it, there would be little 
difficulty in effecting a substantial confiscation of the 
property of the present owners. Possibly the taxpay- 
ers might groan a little, but their woes are not com- 
monly regarded very seriously ; and after a while there 
might be little or nothing left to them wherewith to 
pay. What would happen then, it is hard to predict. 
Perhaps they may be obliged to resort to the methods 
of the inhabitants of some of the Channel Islands and 
make a precarious living by taking in one another's 
washing. It is to be hoped, however, that the danger 
may be averted in some such way as that which was re- 
cently adopted in Chicago, where the city has become a 
virtual partner in the street railway business, entitled to 
a share of net profits, but not liable for losses ; or every- 
body may become so wealthy under the rule of the 
"progressives" that "trams" may be abolished and 
every citizen will possess his own motor-car. 

There was an object-lesson to the public which has 
been carefully ignored by the press, in the circumstance 
that although, under the pet theory of the cheapening 
of cost by competition, the destruction of the combina- 
tion of all the lines in New York in the "Metropolitan" 
should have made rates lower, it actually resulted in a 



i5i 

greater cost to the passengers. The theory is false, of 
course, as a generalization, and the Government has 
practically repudiated it in destroying competition 
among inter-state railways by requiring uniformity of 
rates. Most of the objections to the consolidation of 
railroads resolve themselves into the one proclaimed 
by the celebrated Hibernian who used to be charged 
two fares of five cents each to travel from his home to 
his factory, and the same on his return, but, after a 
"merger," was required to pay only five cents each 
way; "the devilish ingenuity of these hellish com- 
bines," as he characterized them, being shown by the 
fact that while formerly he could save twenty cents a 
day by walking, he could now save only ten. It has 
always been unfortunate that the tariff on imports has 
been made the shuttlecock of politics, but it is a far 
greater calamity that all trade and business should be 
made the playthings of the demagogues. 

These reflections are not, I confess, as profound 
as they ought to be. When men who, during a portion 
of their lives, have indulged in the pleasing illusion that 
they were ordinarily respectable citizens, with a decent 
reputation for honesty and patriotic impulse, awake 
to a consciousness that by a fortuitous combination of 



152 

circumstances they have suddenly become Ishmaelites, 
with no effective means of self-defence — unless they 
are provided with a skilful press-bureau, which itself 
is not always effective — they are apt to become morose 
and soured in their temper, and their reflections are 
of a nature which it is doubtless good policy not to 
disclose even in the bosom of one's family. The Pub- 
lic Service Law, with that lack of kindness so charac- 
teristic of statutes, insists that the terms "receiver" 
and "corporation" are synonymous, so that when 
innocent human beings are made "receivers" of cor- 
porations, not only the property of the corporations 
but all the wickedness, offences and crimes of those 
much-abused artificial persons are ipso facto unloaded 
upon the receivers, who are then turned out into the 
wilderness like scapegoats, with all the burden upon 
them. No one ever seemed to care very much about 
the feelings of the scapegoat. It may be said that this 
afflicted animal was worse off than the Receivers, be- 
cause he did not have the consolation of a quarterly 
cheque to alleviate his miseries ; but there are chords in 
man's nature which, when rudely smitten, cannot be 
attuned to harmony by such sordid things as cheques, 
even when certified and drawn for considerable 



153 

amounts. Taking one consideration with another, the 
Receiver's lot, like the policeman's, is not a happy one. 
Still there is comfort in the thought that as our fellow- 
beings quickly forget all about us, we forget all our 
troubles almost as quickly. 



READING AND OTHER THINGS. 



READING AND OTHER THINGS. 

It may well be said that there is nothing new to 
be written about the reading habit, and that there is 
altogether too much of what Mr. Roberts calls "the 
somewhat labored commonplaces of the ordinary book- 
lover." But there is nothing very new to be written 
about most old subjects, and the subject of books is 
fairly ancient. Hence I have added "and other things" 
to my title, in the hope that before I have done I may 
be able to utter something which is as new, at least, 
as the Constitution of a progressive Western State, but 
I trust more harmless. 

Great personages are apt to treat books in a conde- 
scending way, occasionally a little scornfully, but they 
do not pretend to be able to do without them altogether. 
Mr. John Milton, attempting to ride two horses in a 
manner hardly worthy of so famous a bard, after the 
fashion of a modern statesman endeavoring to please 
two opposing factions in his party, said in Paradise 
Regained: 



158 

"However, many books 
Wise men have said, are wearisome: who reads 
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
A spirit and a judgment equal or superior 
(And what he brings, what need he elsewhere seek?) 
Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself." 

This is pretty poor stuff for a real poet. It implies 
that a man who already has "a spirit and a judgment 
equal or superior" need not read, and that the object 
of reading should be to procure that kind of a spirit 
and a judgment, equal to something undisclosed or 
superior to something about which we are not informed. 
It also implies that a man is shallow who is "deep-versed 
in books/' a generalization which is unfounded in fact. 
He appears, however, to be willing to concede that a 
fairly intelligent reader, if he does not devote himself 
incessantly to his nefarious pursuit, may get some good 
out of his books. Indeed, had there been no books, 
it may be doubted whether we should have had any 
Paradise Lost, and surely we would have had no 
Areopagitica. But one must not expect much logical 
sense from poets; and when Milton wrote Paradise 
Regained — a tame and chilly piece of work, although 



159 

Wordsworth and Coleridge affected to prefer it to 
Paradise Lost — he was at the stage of his career when 
it would have been better for him to rest on the laurels 
already won. 

Milton's dicta belong to the class of observations 
designed for the purpose of flattering the unfortunates 
who know little and care less about books, for, sad to 
relate, there are not a few of such benighted creatures. 
Even true book-lovers occasionally fall into the snare 
and appear to accept those observations, half-apologiz- 
ing for their affectionate interest in the printed word. 
A distinguished old gentleman of my acquaintance, who 
has been a soldier, a legislator, a judge, and an editor — 
mark the ascending scale — and who is as bookish a 
man as I ever knew, delivered an eloquent address at 
a college not long ago, in the course of which he said : 
"It is a distressing reflection to the student how little 
he remembers of what he reads," and he quoted the 
remark of "a celebrated author" whom, in his digni- 
fied, old-style way, he characterized as "a man of 
uncommon erudition," that "he who remembers most, 
remembers little compared with what he forgets." 
Neither the plaint of the distinguished octogenarian 
nor the sententious deliverance of the gentleman of 



i6o 

uncommon erudition indicate much profundity of 
thought. Each belongs to the order of solemn plati- 
tudes, dear to the admirers of Martin Farquhar Tup- 
per — if there are any left at present; and the apo- 
thegm of the celebrated author has about as much real 
meaning as the assertion that "he who has eaten most 
has eaten little compared with what he has not eaten," 
or that "he who has seen most has seen little compared 
with what he has never seen." There should be nothing 
to distress a rational being in the reflection that he 
has read more than he remembers. There is a good 
deal of profit as well as a vast amount of comfort in a 
judicious forgetting. Carlyle said in one of his Note 
Books that "no man without Themistocles' gift of for- 
getting can possibly spend his days in reading," and 
he comes back to the thought in Sartor Resartus when 
he tells us that "vain was the prayer of Themistocles 
for a talent of forgetting." The mind which could 
retain all that its owner had ever read would soon be- 
come a miserable lumber-room full of useless old furni- 
ture, a wretched rag-bag of a mind, so crowded with 
rubbish as to be altogether valueless to its possessor. 
Some ingenious persons, it is true, insist that we never 
forget anything, that whatever is once received in our 



i6i 



consciousness remains there, dormant, perhaps, but 
ready to be roused and recalled when touched aright. 
While we do, sometimes, have a flash of recollection 
of something which we thought had utterly disap- 
peared from our ken, the instances are too few to war- 
rant the assertion of a general rule. At all events, I 
see no good reason why any one should be moved to 
melancholy because he is unable to remember all he 
ever read, sense and nonsense. If he has read with 
intelligence, he will remember enough for any good 
purpose; he will remember the substance, and if he 
needs the exact words, he will know where to go to 
look for them. The really distressing reflection is 
that of De Quincey, told of in Rev. Francis Jacox's 
recollections of the Opium-Eater: "It is one of the 
afflictions of life that one must read thousands of books 
only to discover that one need not have read them." 
Genuine lovers of books are not accustomed to fret 
over their reading, but if they are in need of something 
to worry over, De Quincey's reflection is worth their 
while. Even that cannot be accepted without qualifica- 
tion. It is often a delight to read a book merely to find 
out for oneself that it is worthless. It is a pleasure 
to feel that you are wise enough to discern that it is 



1 62 

of no value; it tickles that vanity which all men and 
a few — very few — women have, although some conceal 
it better than others. A thoughtful reader wearies of 
a monotonous diet of perfection. Even Sir Francis 
Burnand's burlesques 1 of popular novels, inane and 
tedious as they are, give one a better appetite for Bret 
Harte's, and I would add for Thackeray's, if one 
needed to have the appetite whetted for George de 
Barnwell, Codlingsby, and Phil Fogarty. A book by 
William Carew Hazlitt endears to us the graceful 
fancies of Andrew Lang all the more by its awkward 
ineptitude, and one of Mr. Carnegie's light and airy 
volumes of persiflage will make almost any other 
printed thing a joy forever. 

We certainly remember the substance of good 
books. Last summer I read for the second time the 
Autobiography of Anthony Trollope, a most enter- 
taining one, whose only fault is that it incited Mr. 
Samuel Smiles, the "Self-Help" man, to write a very 
dull one. The side dissertations on novel-writing gen- 
erally are passably uninteresting in comparison with 
the personal details, but I found that I recalled almost 
all that was actually autobiographical. Next I re-read 
The Speakers of the House, by Herbert Bruce Fuller, 



163 

dealing with the Speakers of our House, from Muhlen- 
berg to Cannon, replete with inaccuracies mingled 
with some infantile comments worthy of a Freshman 
fumbling over his first "essay," and discovered that I 
had utterly forgotten every word of it. 

I knew a man of high distinction in politics and in 
finance who was so blessed that after having "gone 
through" one of our modern novels and laid it aside, 
he could pick it up next day and read it all over again 
in blissful ignorance of ever having seen it before. 
Themistocles would have envied him. 

Judging by the multitude of books produced and 
by the number of libraries existing, there must be a lot 
of reading done even in these days of engrossing sports 
and persistent money-grubbing. It is a question if 
most of the reading done in libraries is really "read- 
ing" ; one may study there, but that is altogether a dif- 
ferent thing. It is a coincidence that within an hour 
after this last sentence was written, I found in 
my morning newspaper a notice of the annual 
meeting of the New York Library Association, 
at which the President of the society "explained 
the benefits to be derived from what she described 
as 'joy reading' as opposed to the perusal of 



164 

books for the purpose merely of gaining knowl- 
edge." The "slang" is horrifying when uttered by a 
lady librarian, but the idea is good; I wish merely to 
record my objection to the phrase on the ground that 
the sort of reading she was describing is scarcely as 
deadly and destructive as the "joy riding" the lady 
had in mind. 

The very best reading is that which we do for pleas- 
ure only. I am not unaware that Ruskin in Sesame 
and Lilies denounces "mere reading" and, particularly, 
purposeless reading. Ruskin was never quite sane, and 
a man who excludes from his catalogue of books worth 
reading Thackeray, George Eliot, Kingsley, Swift, 
Hume, and Macaulay does not deserve much credence. 
Carlyle, too, said in his Inaugural Address at the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh that "it would be safer and bet- 
ter for many a reader that he had no concern with 
books at all," and that "there is a number of books 
that are decidedly to the readers of them not useful." 
The first assertion is a mere attempt to say something 
startling, and the second is only a platitude. If we 
should throw away all books that are not useful, fully 
half of Carlyle's, if not more, would go in the waste- 
basket. Ruskin and Carlyle were poseurs, brilliant, 



i65 

erratic, and frequently wrong-headed. Arthur Chris- 
topher Benson, in his Cambridge Lectures on Ruskin, 
while defending the former in his gentle, captivating 
way, is forced to admit it, and as to Carlyle, nobody 
denies it. 

Reading a library book or a borrowed book 
can never be as delightful as reading one's own 
book. It is like dwelling in a hired house compared 
with living in your own home. No well-constituted 
person can love a hired house, and as for a rented 
"apartment," he might as well become attached to a 
trolley car. We all understand the sentiment of the 
beloved Autocrat when he was speaking of "the old 
gambrel-roof house at Cambridge" and said, referring 
to his affection for even "the stone with a whitish band" 
in the pavement in the back yard, "our hearts are held 
down in our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as 
that I have just recalled, but Gulliver was fixed to the 
soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a 
time." Yet he was compelled reluctantly to admit that 
the demolition of the old house was "a case of justi- 
fiable domicide," and I could never believe that the de- 
struction of the old copy of Knickerbocker's History, 
on which, so to speak, I cut my literary teeth, could 



i66 

be justified on any ground whatsoever. When I last 
saw it the binding was gradually coming off, but it 
seemed as sacred as it did fifty years or more ago. 

Doubtless the reading habit, which, in the words 
of Andrew Lang, "has been praised as a virtue and has 
been denounced as a crime," should be acquired in 
childhood. If it is not, it rarely rises to the dignity 
of a habit. I used to be surprised to learn from the 
autobiographies and reminiscences of eminent person- 
ages — men as unlike, for example, as Charles Dickens 
and Samuel Smiles — how they began their reading 
orgies with the tales of Fielding and of Smollett. The 
parents ef those days were evidently accustomed to 
stow away in obscure closets the works of these authors 
in order that small boys might there come upon them 
and devour them eagerly. Those stories appear to us 
now to be rather strong meat for babes, but I suppose 
the babes saw only the charm of the narrative and did 
not comprehend the indecencies. A child of the pres- 
ent day would not be likely to proceed much beyond the 
title-page of a novel of Fielding or of Smollett, and I 
sneakingly confess that I have never myself had the 
courage to read one of them entirely through. I break 
down in the mire before I have made half the journey. 



1 67 

About 1780 some inspired idiot produced abridgments 
of Tom Jones and other tales of Fielding "adapted to 
infant minds/' but I never saw one or heard that any- 
body ever read one of them. 

Lang, in Adventures Among Books, excusing him- 
self for apparent egotism, dwells upon the books he 
loved in childhood, saying, "There is no other mind, 
naturally, of which the author knows so much as of his 
own. 'On n'a que soi/ as the poor girl says in one 
of M. Paul Bourget's novels. In literature, as in love, 
one can speak only for himself." When I was a very 
small boy — which is more years ago than I care to dis- 
close at present — the accessible books were rather few 
and quite varied in their nature. I remember the 
aforesaid Knickerbocker — "il decano di miei libri," as 
Alfieri styled his Machiavelli, but the book was not 
actually my own property; the Sketch Book; Blia; G. P 
R. James's Philip Augustus; The Lamplighter; Widow 
Bedott Papers; Frost's History of the United States; 
and a lot of early numbers of Harper's Magazine of the 
period when that publication had some literary value. 
These were queerly mixed up with the library of a 
physician, so that they were all oddly confused in my 
mind with such enlivening works as Dunglison's Prac- 



i68 

rice of Medicine, Stczvart On the Diseases of Children, 
somebody's Materia Medica and the London Lancet. 
There was also Yonatt On the Dog, in which I studied 
the subject of hydrophobia so assiduously that I would 
run like a deer if I saw a puppy coming around the 
corner. I could have passed a fairly creditable exami- 
nation in Knickerbocker, every line of which was ac- 
cepted as veritable history. I remember being sur- 
prised that the members of a very respectable family 
living in our village were not given to playing on the 
jewsharp, an occupation to which their namesakes, ac- 
cording to the veracious Diedrich, were hopelessly ad- 
dicted. The Essays of Elia were a little beyond my un- 
derstanding, save only the immortal Dissertation Upon 
Roast Pig, and even of that I suppose I missed the 
inner significance; but I am proud to recall that I did 
not have much respect for The Lamplighter, which was 
a sort of "best seller" in those times. Of course, I had 
Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, 
both of which I adored; and Sandford and Merton, 
which I heartily detested. Later there were some of 
Mayne Reid's fascinating tales of hunting adventures, 
and I am inclined to think that my assortment of litera- 
ture was a tolerably good one to begin with. It is 



i6g 

almost needless to say that in Harper's, the Life of Na- 
poleon, by John S. C. Abbott, was the piece de resist- 
ance, and such is the permanence of childish impres- 
sions, that none of the more pretentious biographies of 
Bonaparte which have since appeared have destroyed 
my belief that Napoleon was a maligned and perse- 
cuted benefactor of mankind. I hated the Duke of 
Wellington, but felt that his conduct at Waterloo was 
only what might be expected from one of a race so lost 
to all sense of shame as to make George Washington 
uneasy, and so depraved as to fire upon the Chesa- 
peake in times of peace and annoy Commodore Bar- 
ron, who never did anybody any harm — not even the 
enemy. I think that Mr. Lang is wrong when he an- 
nounces that "a boy of five is more at home in fairy- 
land than in his own country/' It may be so in Scot- 
land, but not in these United States if he has a grand- 
father skilled in the relation of stories of the Revolu- 
tion. At that early age I knew more about Washing- 
ton and a certain mythical hero of 1775- 1783, called 
by my said grandfather "Dan Tucker/' than I ever 
did about fairies, who, at least within thirty miles of 
New York, seemed undeserving of belief, while the 
patriotic and resourceful Tucker might well have per- 



170 

formed his prodigies of skill and valor in the "neutral 
ground" between the Croton River and Spuyten Duyvil 
Creek or in the swamps and woods of South Carolina. 
Of course, all children have queer ideas at times 
about what they read and still queerer about what is 
read to them. Pip, in Great Expectations, supposed that 
his declaration in the Catechism that he was "to walk 
in the same all the days of his life/' laid him under 
obligation "always to go through the village from his 
home in one particular direction and never to vary it 
by turning down by the wheelwright's or up by the 
mill," and one of our Sunday-school pupils was curious 
about the words of the Commandment, "the earth, the 
sea and all that in them is," wanting to know where 
"the miz" was. A like misapprehension existed in the 
mind of another who asked why the minister said in 
the Collect every Sunday, "Give us that two cents." I 
really thought that the poet's adjuration to "drink deep 
or taste not the Pierian spring" required me, when I 
drank, to swallow the entire contents of the bowl which 
stood by the side of the well. When the lady who told 
me of General Jackson and was quite severe about his 
"duels" — a word she pronounced in an old-fashioned 
way — I firmly believed that the hero of New Orleans 



171 

at some time in his eventful career had been concerned 
in discreditable transactions about jewels, akin to the 
theft of the Diamond Necklace ; and being a scion of a 
Democratic race, I was puzzled because the "Black Re- 
publicans" whom I met in the street were by no means 
of a sable complexion. Still, I was able to arrive quite 
successfully at the meaning of most of the books which 
I pored over diligently. 

I have now indulged my egotism so unduly that I 
refrain from dwelling upon the later delightful period 
of introduction to the enchanted world of Marryat and 
Cooper, Walter Scott and Dickens, which to this day 
has never lost its charm. I omit Thackeray, for he is 
not a boy's novelist; an appreciation of him does not 
come ordinarily until about the time of Junior year at 
college, when the youngster usually begins with Pen- 
dennis and fancies himself quite a man of the world. 
At least that was so consule Planco; how it may be 
now, I confess I do not know. Often I wonder, hav- 
ing no boys of my own, what boys read now. I am 
quite sure that they do not devote themselves to 
Knickerbocker or Elia, to Marryat, Cooper, Scott or 
Dickens. Our young men who read must do so by 
stealth. I never see them engaged over books, and if 



172 

they read at all they must be a little ashamed of it, for 
they carefully avoid any mention of it. The demands 
of society, of sport, and of business are too pressing, I 
infer, among the well-to-do; the poor lads who are 
anticipating a "career'' may do a good deal of reading 
in their way, but it is mostly for profit and not for 
pleasure, I fancy. I may be all wrong about this, and 
I hope I am. 

It is a question in my mind which is the more 
odious person, the one who tells you what you ought 
to read or the one who favors you with a list of the 
"one hundred best books." There cannot be "one hun- 
dred best books" ; it reminds me of the remark of a col- 
ored porter on a Pullman car who, when I asked him 
what was the best hotel in Keokuk, Iowa, replied, 
"Dar ain't no best hotel in Keokuk." These volunteer 
advisers are all kindly people, quite well satisfied with 
themselves and with their own judgment, but the per- 
versity of man is such that with most of us the surest 
way to condemn a book and to make it repulsive is to 
have it recommended by a well-meaning friend. If 
ever I am guilty of telling any one that he should read 
any particular book, I trust that I may be sentenced 
to read nothing for the remainder of my life but the 



173 

works of Mr. Upton Sinclair and of Mr. Jack London 
or the so-called historical effusions of Mr. Alfred 
Henry Lewis. I have heretofore confided to the ex- 
tremely intellectual but numerically inconsiderable por- 
tion of the human race which feeds upon my produc- 
tions that the true way to lead people to read the book 
you wish to urge upon them is to leave the volume in 
some place where they themselves will come upon it 
casually, and after they have dipped into it, they may, 
if it should appeal to their tastes, go on with it and 
enjoy all the pleasure of an original discovery. I be- 
lieve there is a maxim that no one ever reads a book 
which is given to him, but like most maxims it is not 
universally true. I owe to a considerate friend my first 
acquaintance with that refined and satisfactory writer, 
E. V. Lucas; but as a rule one is much more apt to 
read the book he buys than the presented one, because 
he usually selects it himself. It is but natural that each 
man should have his own likes and dislikes even if, 
like the gentleman who, from the time of Martial to 
that of Tom Brown, found himself unable to formulate 
his reasons for his antipathy to an obnoxious individ- 
ual; he cannot define the causes of either. Some do 
not care to spend time over any books which are not 



174 

of the latest imprint, wholly up to date in form and con- 
tents, while others, like the scholarly Mr. Beverly 
Chew, are proud to assure us that 

"What though the prints be not so bright, 
The paper dark, the binding slight ? 
Our author, be he dull or sage, 
Returning from a distant age 
So lives again. We say of right, 
Old books are best." 

There are books of a certain class very common in 
England, but not often produced in this country, which 
have always been to me a source of curious interest. I 
mean such books as The Fair Quaker, Glimpses of the 
Twenties, by Toynbee, Ghosts of Piccadilly, by Street, 
and Noble Dames and Notable Men by John Fyvie, to 
take a few at random. They are mostly of an histori- 
cal nature and our neighbors over the water will, of 
course, account for our lack of them by saying that we 
have no history worth gossiping about, but only the 
ordinary and unromantic story of politics and econom- 
ics. Some of these English books, well-printed and 
handsomely illustrated as they are, seem poor and 
feeble, like The Fair Quaker, which is a monumental 
mass of padding and leads to no definite conclusion, for 



175 

after we have toiled through well-nigh three hundred 
and fifty pages of text we are as uncertain whether 
George III ever did marry Hannah Lightfoot as we 
were when we began, and we are positive only that it 
makes no difference to any human being in any quarter 
of the world whether he did or not. But many of them 
are both instructive and amusing. A few days ago an 
author and critic of well-deserved reputation was glanc- 
ing at the backs of my books, and coming upon the title, 
"Piccadilly to Pall Mall," expressed wonder why 
things of that kind were written and whether people 
really bought them and read them. His own experi- 
ence of nearly thirty years in association with litera- 
ture and with one of our most famous publishing 
houses had convinced him that the only general de- 
mand is for fiction. I confessed with becoming meek- 
ness that I not only bought them — second-hand copies 
— but read them, too, and even enjoyed them. They 
must be well-esteemed in England, or no one would 
print them, "commercial success" being the end and 
aim of publishers there as well as here. I am not quite 
conceited enough to regard my own views of the mat- 
ter as of consequence or presumptuous enough to ob- 
trude them upon my countrymen, but I cannot help 



176 

thinking that if we would cast aside most of the tons 
of trash and vats of slush which are called "novels" 
and find out for ourselves that there is some interest in 
real things, the results of immature intelligence and 
untrained imaginations would be ascertained to be little 
deserving of attention and the better it would be for us. 
Of course, there must be novels and newspapers, but 
to call the devouring of modern novels and daily news- 
papers "reading" is as much a misuse of language as 
it would be to apply that term to a child's perusal of its 
pictured primer. 

Having thus relieved my mind, and with the pleas- 
ing consciousness that my fervent protest will be about 
as effective as a plea for political sanity would be in an 
Arizona convention, and remarking, by the way, that 
we have in Locke a contemporary novelist worthy to 
rank with the boasted fiction-purveyors of the last cen- 
tury, let me proceed with that "chatter about books" 
which Mr. Frederic Harrison, with a vindictive cru- 
elty unbecoming to a being generally so harmless, ac- 
cuses of "choking the seed which is sown in the great- 
est books of the world," although I fail to understand 
how it can possibly have such a disastrous agricultural 
effect. Surely "the seed of the greatest books of the 



177 

world, whatever that may be, should be strong enough 
not to be choked by such feeble means; and if the seed 
is choked, how can the solemn Mr. Harrison know 
that it would have produced anything? It might de- 
pend on the soil. In the words of the philosopher 
Dundreary, "What (condemned) nonsense that is! 
Birds of a feather !" One would not be at all humilia- 
ted or cast down to be thus scolded by a writer of great 
books, but when it comes to Mr. Frederic Harrison, as 
Artemus Ward observed to Brigham Young, it is 
"2 mutch," even from a Person who was called "the 
chief living representative in England of Positivism 
and the Religion of Humanity." Assuredly nobody 
ever chattered about Harrison's books; one would as 
soon think of chattering about the works of William 
Prynne or the poetry of Alfred Austin. Men are apt 
to call "chatter" whatever talk they happen not to 
fancy; but to many excellent people the "quack-quack- 
ing" {vide Carlyle) of the Positive Philosophers is as 
odious as book-talk is to Harrison. Travelers fre- 
quently describe the language of foreigners as "jab- 
bering," ignoring the fact that to the "poor foreigner" 
the speech of the travelers must seem just as "jabber- 
ous." And now, as Speaker Tom Reed observed of an 



i 7 8 

interrupting Democrat, "having embalmed that fly in 
the liquid amber of my remarks," we may return to 
books. 

One's enjoyment of a book is often strangely 
marred by the size and weight of the volume. Almost 
every one is attracted by a little book which may easily 
be held in the hand. We are told that it was Darwin's 
habit, when a book was too big and heavy for his con- 
venience, to cut it in two ; perhaps the necessity of such 
violent and disrespectful treatment is responsible for 
the word "tome" which comes from a Greek word 
meaning "a piece cut off" — a fragment of learning 
which I throw out carelessly, having acquired it by the 
strange method of looking it up in the dictionary. 
Darwin's custom must have been rather an expensive 
one and it was as biblioclastic as De Quincey's pastime 
of tearing out the leaves of rare books and scribbling 
copy for the printer on the broad margins of valuable 
folios. Those big books are well enough for the library 
and for the shelves of a "collector," but they are a bur- 
den to the reader, especially if he is that beloved friend 
of the old writers, a "gentle" reader. Another annoy- 
ance is the multiplication of notes on the page, in 
which the editor is fond of parading his learning. 



179 

How this may affect others I cannot say, but to me 
it is refreshing to get in my hands a gem of a book 
like my Boswell, edited by Augustine Birrell, with only 
a few notes and a page seven inches by four. Mr. 
Birrell wisely says in his charming introduction: "As 
for the learned editors who load the page of their 
author with notes and references and cross-references, 
personally I delight in their labours and reverence their 
devotion; but in the first instance, at all events (I re- 
peat) the book is the thing"; and he tells us that he 
made many notes, but on reflection struck most of them 
out, feeling himself convinced not of their worthless- 
ness, but of their unimportance. Noble editor! One 
longs to greet you with hurrahs — or perhaps "huzzas" 
would be more appropriate to the time of Boswell. 
Why they cried "huzza I" in the eighteenth century and 
"hurrah!" in the nineteenth, I could never find 
out, possibly because I never tried. The preferable 
way of dealing with the long and elaborate notes is to 
group them in an appendix, where they do not distract 
the eye and divert the attention. Even the most assidu- 
ous reader, the most enthusiastic lover of books, finds 
that his attention wanders at times in spite of himself. 
Now and then we all experience difficulty in following 



i8o 



the sense of what we may happen to be reading, an 
inability to take mental hold of the words before our 
eyes. We may read the same sentence over again and 
again without having the least idea of what the author 
intended to convey, and it is disheartening, when one 
has turned over page after page, to discover that they 
might as well have been so much blank paper. De 
Maistre had a theory worth consideration, and common 
honesty requires that I should confess here and now 
that I found the quotation not in any book of his, but on 
the front of one of Goodspeed's excellent book-cata- 
logues emanating from the pleasant little shop in Park 
Street, Boston. "I have it from an old professor," 
says De Maistre, "and this as long ago as I can re- 
member, that Plato used to call matter the Othe;r. 
This is all very well, but I prefer this name par excel- 
lence for the animal which is joined to our soul. 
* * * But this requires illustration. When, sir, you 
are reading a book, and an agreeable idea suddenly 
strikes your imagination, your soul attaches herself to 
the new idea at once, and forgets the book, while your 
eyes follow mechanically the words and lines. You 
get through the page without understanding and with- 
out remembering what you have read. Now this is 



i8i 



because your soul, having ordered her companion to 
read to her, gave no warning of the short absence she 
contemplated, so that the Othe;r went on reading what 
the soul no longer attended to." This explanation, 
pleasantly fanciful, is not devoid of truth, but summed 
up, it means simply that the reader was thinking of 
something else. That is one of the reasons why when 
you are crossing the ocean it is almost impossible to 
read anything serious as you sit on the steamer deck in 
one of those exceedingly uncomfortable chairs which, 
for some inscrutable reason, are provided for the tor- 
ture of passengers at the extremely modest price of one 
dollar each. Often we have promised ourselves to oc- 
cupy the abundant leisure of a transatlantic journey 
with a collection of real literature, and, when the voy- 
age was over, have discovered that we had encum- 
bered our luggage to no purpose, for we had left the 
meritorious books untouched. All we could do was 
to dawdle over something like The Broad Highway, 
where if you miss a fisticuff-fight or two it is really no 
loss, or the gruesome One Braver Thing, where one 
horror more or less is no great matter. Once I bravely 
began The Early Life of Charles James Fox as we left 
behind us the great docks of Southampton, but by the 



182 

time we sighted Sandy Hook and were nerving our- 
selves to meet our Customary warm reception, Fox was 
scarcely out of his knickerbockers — if he wore them. 
The sight of a porpoise, the appearance of a tramp 
steamer, the flight of a stray bird, even the glimpse of 
the white crest of an unusually big wave, were enough 
to destroy all interest in the lucid sentences of the 
scholarly Trevelyan. It was on this particular voyage 
that there was demonstrated to me the uselessness of 
singing, "Where, oh! where are the Hebrew children ?" 
for I had not the least difficulty in ascertaining their 
whereabouts, and their playful and vociferous gambols 
proved to be by no means conducive to calm reflection 
or the pursuit of historical knowledge. 

After all, I find that even with the comprehensive 
subject of "other things," I have kept close to books 
and have not been guilty of uttering anything which 
by the exercise of the most vivid imagination can be 
called "new." Perhaps it is just as well that I gave up 
the attempt; whenever I have fondly believed that I 
had evolved a novel idea, I have found that it had been 
expressed years ago by some miscreant who, in turn, 
had borrowed it from an ancient Greek or Egyptian 
person. What a delightful time those very old fellows 



*8 3 

must have had when they could never be told that some 
one else had said their good things before them ! Once 
upon a time I invented a little story about an incident 
supposed to have happened to one of my nearest rela- 
tives, and some months later I was overcome with 
amazement to find it set forth in a newspaper as hav- 
ing occurred in the experience of a man of whom I had 
heard, but whom I had never seen. He was an eminent 
political individual not wholly unconnected with Tam- 
many Hall. 

Adam may have uttered some new things. It is not 
recorded that he had any books; even Noah had none 
on the Ark except Tauchnitz novels, and he threw them 
overboard before daring to face the Ararat custom 
house. Mark Twain said that Adam kept a diary, but 
I doubt it; although, according to Southey, "some one, 
I know not who, has said, upon an equally unknown 
authority, that Adam died of hereditary gout," and that 
I can believe. He, Adam, could not have been the 
one who first referred to books as "beloved compan- 
ions," "friends that never tire," or "the best of good 
comrades," but it must have been some one who lived 
very near his time. I demand due credit for not having 
availed of any of those affectionate expressions, which, 



1 84 

I regret to say, have become rather shop-worn; but I 
must yield to the temptation to let the curtain drop to 
the music of that beloved of all Centurions, the book- 
lover and poet, Richard Henry Stoddard, who wrote 
with absolute sincerity, 

"When others fail him, the wise man looks 
To the sure companionship of books." 



[9671H] 



LBA.p'12 



UBR ARY OF 



CONGRESS 



0016 235 



267 2 S 



